Link to Jenni’s writing: http://morri246.edublogs.org/2006/01/29/reading-response-3-michigan-state-
I would like to respond to Jenni’s comments on the Michigan Board of Education’s suggestion that all students take an online course before they graduate high school. When I glanced over the article, my immediate response was, well, why not? It seems to me that online course taking would be beneficial in a number of ways, which I briefly discussed in a reading response on my own blog. While I still believe in the benefits which I listed in that response, I think Jenni’s comments about internet access and computer availability have some valid points which I did not consider in my initial writing. I grew up in an area that ranged from upper-middle class to the lower working classes, and I know that all of my friends who came from working-class backgrounds did not have a computer in their home at the time. I sometimes saw them rushing to do research at lunchtime or before school at the library’s computers, then waiting for the antiquated printer system to spit out information they wanted to print.
Reading Jenni’s response forced me to take a look back at high school and remember that computers are still, as we would say in Econ 201, a luxury item for many people without the money to buy one. I think I may have just become used to how things are here at MSU, where everyone has a computer and everyone uses them constantly. Unfortunately, funding for schools is such that buying more computers for every high school probably won’t happen any time soon. Jenni’s idea about providing a course that instructs about online test-taking is a good one and could probably give students with limited internet access the opportunity to learn enough to function well with online courses in the future.
Those of us who find ourselves in schools with limited internet access should probably try to find ways to give our students time to use the computers that are available. At the beginning of the term there could be some lessons on how to do effective and accurate research on the internet. During time given for homework, a few students each week could be given the alternate assignment of researching the current topic online and presenting what they found to the class. We will all have to be creative with this issue as we will all probably encounter situations where the resources we need are not always available.
