Welcome to the Personal Web Space of Breanne Quist
My name is Breanne Quist and I graduated with my teaching degree from Vancouver Island University in June 2011. I am happily married to my husband of three years and together we have two daughters - Aliyah (born in September 2011) and Sadie (born in March 2013). I am currently teaching grade eight and nine distance learning through Anchor Academy (based in Salmon Arm) and although it is a bit of a learning curve, I have enjoyed it so far. My future goal was to be in a classroom and bringing technology there but I find that this is constantly changing as I am learning more about the different opportunities out there so who knows where I will end up? For the time being teaching from home and being able to stay home with my daughters is pretty awesome.
My experience with distance learning is not very deep at the moment but I hope that through this course I will be learning things that I can apply to my online classroom and vice versa. I have taken courses online through VIU in the past so I am not completely oblivious but as I have stated before, I believe that I have a learning curve ahead of me. I have completed some training that was mandatory when I took my teaching position but as helpful as it was I have longed for more and I would like to try to get to pro-d conferences and seminars that help facilitate amazing learning through the online classroom.
One of the biggest benefits of online learning that I can think of is the fact that students would be able to have online discussions where they are able to read what other’s have posted and put their own thoughts down to share with everyone else. In the classroom it is hard to keep the number of students called on at a number large enough that enough opinions are heard but small enough that there is still time for everything. With Online Learning there is also the benefit of having everything posted online so if a student were sick, for example, they would be able to go to the teacher’s website and look through the readings and get their assignments so that when they feel better, they would not be punished with a bunch of work that needs catching up on. A third benefit I can think of with online learning is that with online classrooms, classroom management goes down so the teacher can actually benefit from more time being able to teach and less time trying to get everyone’s attention.
Some limitations with online learning that I can think of would be in specific classes. The two big classes I can think of are math and science. In the classroom students are able to complete experiments and collaborate with classmates over the results and observations. With online learning the students are either confined to watching the experiment as a video and never getting to experience it or they have to conduct it at their own house where they might not have all the supplies that a school might have. With math, I know from experience of tutoring a lot of students, there is a big struggle; how are we able to walk a student through a math problem that involves graphing or square roots when those buttons cannot be pushed on the keyboard and just appear.
How do we make sure that all students get equal and adequate support needed to thrive in Online Learning?
