21stcenturyed.com

June, July and August.

If those are three of the reasons you got into education, you may have chosen the wrong profession. Like social workers, doctors and other professions, educators have a serious charge: to help others.

So – sorry. It’s not really about you – it’s about them. The sooner you accept and embrace this truth – and live it out through your professional life – the sooner you’ll make real change in students’ lives.

Online educators, especially, must come to recognize that:

• …learning will not necessarily occur between 8:30 am and 3:30 pm.
• Students won’t always want to learn a topic the way you were trained to teach it – nor do they have to since they now have choices in education.
• What make school easier for you is not necessarily what is best for students. Like bell schedules, synchronous instruction or quiet classrooms.

So get over yourself. It’s not about you. Make the time to call your students and their parents. Stop reinventing the wheel just so you can say you wrote a great lesson. That’s time you could have spent explaining a difficult student to a student who needs you.

I challenge you to take 30 minutes to examine what and how you do things related to your teaching and to identify at least one thing that you could be doing to better meet the student needs.

Last year I sat in the opening keynote at NACOL’s Vitrual School Symposium while NACOL’s President Susan Patrick spoke about the emergence of WiMax in China. This will reportedly provide high-speed Internet access across a 50 kilometer radius (sixty Wimax towers would cover a state the size of Pennsylvania). This will allow China to carry out their plans to dramatically increase their use of online learning to educate their children.
So what this means is that the type of online learning you can provide in areas covered by WiMax would dramatically change. No longer will you need to worry about sticking to static images and text as the primary delivery method for students in largely rural environments. Flash-based interactive instruction is possible. So is streaming video, for that matter. Imagine how streaming video of several students at a time via web cam can close the transactional There is still an infrastructure used by many districts nationwide in the US that uses cable TV and satelite link-ups to provide this now, When this level of video instruction is used, students often have to travel to centers to access it – which is a bit at odds with one of the largest benefits of online education: accessibility.
Wimax could be a piece of the puzzle that leads to true equality in access. Kid in cities like Baltimore already benefit from having high-speed access throughout most of the city. Kids in your town can be next. All of this is possible – as long as bureaucracy and greed do not get in the way of effective and fair deals leading to equalizing access for all citizens.