e-learning: reflection

E-learning was conducted in week 5, with 2 scenarios on classroom management and cyberwellness. Both are about a Mrs Xing's experience conducting E-learning lessons in her school.

Her experience reveals what could possibly happen in real-life situation. E-learning week in school. Check. Students cannot download something. Check. Copy wholesale from resources. Check. Students caught surfing pornographic website. Er, not yet but have heard of such incident in other context.

Students are assumed to have the necessary skills to perform tasks required on the computer. That, I believe should not pose any problems. The teacher's part, then, should be ensure that whatever she has to uploard into the system works. And she also has to consider and discuss together with her department, the best platform to use for e-learning. It is supposed to be a whole school programme, thus everyone is involved. Traffic usage is heavy, especially towards the end of deadline. Each department should foresee and pre-empt whatever problems could arise, and not fire-fight in the end. They should consider topics, lesson plans, assessment, etc carefully.

Prior to e-learning week, the school should also inform parents about the event and conduct a series of cyberwellness for both parents and students. Topics to be covered could include safety, property rights, cyberbullying, pornography and addiction. A simple checklist of good behaviour could be given to each student for them to self-check. Parents could also be advised to exercise parental control and block certain unknown/dubious websites so that their children can only access some safe websites.

Although we may have the best intentions and give all the advice and training, ultimately, the students and parents still have to exercise their choices. Teachers and school cannot be held totally accountable if the students should surf porno websites or be addicted to on-line games. We could advise and guide, but there is a limit to how much we could do. As for plagiarism, the students would have to pay the heavy price and be penalised for copying.