Online Education Services

In the modern era, much of the teaching is either done through the internet, or information that is being taught is found on the internet, there are many websites that let students do work online and look for information online and, in this blog, I am going to discuss such websites.

MyMaths

MyMaths.co.uk is a website that offers an online, interactive maths environment. MyMaths is used all over the world; in fact it is actually used in about 70 countries and by about 4 million students a year. The students can access either on-site (at school), or off-site (at home), this enables the students to revise a lesson or do ‘homework for fun’ to enhance their knowledge of mathematics, and MyMaths have claimed that their website has been proven to raise standards of achievement in the mathematics area of learning. 

The lessons that they offer include many things to make the lesson more interesting, things such as games, interactive lessons and interactive worksheets just generally making the whole experience of having to do homework or class work more fun and for some students capable. This online service is also very useful for teachers as it gives them an easier way of setting homework and allows them to teach in a fun, different way while also making it much easier for them to track their students progress.  

So the advantages of MyMaths would be that it makes it much more fun for the students to do work, it helps the teachers teach and allows them to track progress much easier than ever before and it offers games to keep students entertained while also teaching. Along with the advantages there are also disadvantages, these would be that some students may get side tracked by the games and may not get the work done and schools may have to pay fees for joining sites like this. I personally think these types of websites are brilliant as they offer lots of information and display in a fun and interactive way, and, for some people, it makes homework something to look forward to.

Virtual Learning Environments

Virtual Learning Environments, or more commonly known as VLEs are internet servers that allow you to access all of your work maybe from school or work from the comfort of your own desk at home. It requires you to sign into your account you have saved the work on and download it to your home computer and either print off your work or carry on with it. This is very helpful and time saving as it means you do not need to carry a pen drive or memory stick around with you, which can be a hassle as it is easily lost, and you do not need to bother with sending it home via email as it will all be stored on this easy to use VLE.

The many advantages to this service are that it gives you a lot of flexibility around your work and where you can access it from, it gives you the opportunity to gain extra information, and is a general time saver giving people the possibility of working for longer periods of time as they do not have worry about the hassle of saving it to a memory stick or sending it home through an email server.  But there are also some disadvantages with it being quite expensive to install and set up, and there is also the possibility of losing or forgetting passwords and usernames, which can be solved but does cause hassle none the less.

My previous experiences of a VLE is that they are very useful and generally are a great help, but you are leaving the reliability of your work in the hands of the internet, so to speak. If your internet was down for example you would not be able to access your work that you may need to use urgently, by saving a back up copy onto an offline device such as a memory stick, it cancels out an advantages in cutting down time, but then at least you know you will have access to your work whatever the situation.

BBC Bitesize

There are many revision sites that offer students a quick and in depth analysis of a subject or specific topic that they want to revise maybe for an up coming exam or to help with homework. One of the biggest revision sites would be BBC Bitesize, it offers 20 topics to choose from in the GCSE area of learning with many different videos and interactive activities in every subject to give students a broader choice of how they revising, this helps students choose the best way of learning for them as it does offer written things like revision notes and then a miniature test. I personally have used this site many times in the past; especially when revising for my GCSE examination, it gave me a better understanding of some subjects and generally helped me revise.

The advantages of these sites are that they are easy to use, enables the student to revise in a way that may possibly be better or easier for them, but there disadvantages, a user may get distracted from revising and just play the games on the site or do something else on the internet, the information given on the site may be from a different syllabus to the one your actually using for your subjects at school.

Online Resources

The Internet is now one of the main ways to get information on anything, it is so simple anyone who has a basic knowledge of the Internet or computing can easily find anything they want on the web. There are many search engines that if you type something into the search bar, it will return with millions of results, for example, if I typed into ‘football’ it comes up with 1,350,000,000 results, as you can see there is bound to be the information you are looking for on the topic of football throughout the results returned, but then that is a very broad search, if I search a more specific query I will get less results but would still more than likely be returned with enough information to find what I was looking for.

Finding this many results is an obvious advantage if you know what your looking for, if you do not know what you are looking for you could be faced with a problem to try and find genuine information and may use false information for something like work or important documents, this could then turn into being a disadvantage.

School Email

School email is a very useful thing; it is basically just an email server that is just used for a specific network of people throughout the school. Once set up correctly it allows students to type in a teachers name with out an actual email address and send them an email directly. It is just an easier way of using email throughout a school.  The advantages would be that it is very quick and easy to use, allowing users to send an email in an instant as long as the server is set up correctly. The disadvantages would be that the server could crash leaving the students, which may have been relying on this service, without a way to contact the teachers. 

Copyright

A copyright is a set of rights granted to you, as the creator of something you made or created that is original, for a period of time. An example of something that has been copyrighted and is well known to be copyrighted is the iPhone, the iPhone have been copyrighted to make it special among mobile phones and especially touch screen mobile phones.