My Inspiration for Online College, from a Teacher
Posted by Pamela Gustafson on November 14th, 2008
My inspiration for an online education came from my need to schedule my continuing education around my own schedule, and my complete fascination with the online environment itself. My son was always online, creating and posting his own web page at the age of 12, long before the ease of uploading to FaceBook and My Space. Being a teacher, I didn’t want to squelch his curiosity, but at the same time I wanted to keep him safe. This meant that I had to learn about the online environment, to keep ahead of him. While I didn’t always succeed in keeping ahead of him; I learned to use the online environment for my job and my personal life.
I now prefer the online method of education including asynchronous discussion and scheduled synchronous chats and presentations.
The use of the online environment has put energy into my teaching at a time when my energy was waning. My middle school students think of me as a computer geek, when in reality I am just an old dog who has learned new tricks. These new tricks help to keep my students and me interested and involved in the important task of education.
Now I am using a combination on line/ on site method of teaching. My students complete the assignments posted on the student learning center and I grade them online. I have drastically decreased the amount of paper and I never worry about what I left at school. I can access student work whenever I am near a computer.
Tags: Online college, online learning
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This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Student Voices, Why I Considered Online Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
