Online Learning: Upgrades to Online Learning Can Benefit Fast Learning Home-schoolers
By Mimi Rothschild
In this age of technology, it is home-schools that come out on top when they utilize the advances applied to online and distance learning. Most home-schoolers do well with online learning, but the ones who are in the very top percentage of the class and the very lowest are the ones who often lose out. The challenge today is to create a system that can profile the students, assessing strengths and weaknesses in learning ability, and create partner groups in the class that complement each others skills. Home-schooled students will gain not only the knowledge from the class but learn study skills from their peers.
How do home-school students benefit through online learning? Here are just a few benefits:
- Immediate communication with other students and the professor when online.
- Quick answers to questions.
- Frequent updates to class material.
- Constant contact and communication between professor and home-school students.
- Professors can answer each question only once, posting the answer for everyone to refer back to.
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The latest online learning software tracks the movements of home-school students on the class site. It can even show which pages each home-schooler looked at, the time, how long she was logged in. The software can also follow what questions or replies she posted to student forums or emails she sends personally to her professor. When another student asks a question and that question is answered, the new software tracks the activity and lets all home-schoolers know that there is a new bit of information on the site. It takes one student's question and it benefits everybody else.
This tracking in the latest online learning software will benefit home-school students because it helps identify who is having problems with the material before it's too late. The tracking aspect allows the professor to hone in on the home-school students who need her help and avoid answering the same questions again and again.
With the advances to distance learning, home-school parents can check exactly what their kids are doing on the site and make sure that they are keeping up with their homework. It even makes it simple to print out progress results for home-school evaluations and home-school portfolios. Online learning is moving forward all the time, and home-schoolers will only benefit from its progress.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, children's rights activist, author, and Founder and C.E.O. of online education company Learning by Grace, Inc. Rothschild and her husband of twenty-eight years reside in suburban Philadelphia with their eight children.
Feeling that “our current system of education has broken its promise,” Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. to provide families with Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children all over the world.
In addition to her twenty years of experience as a homeschool mother, Rothschild has written a number of books dealing with education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Home Education Websites Blog consists of helpful online content and activities for Christian homeschooling families.
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