Is Online Education More Effective Then Traditional Education

In a class of average size (around 20-25 students) it is difficult for a teacher to monitor all their students. Even while being monitored, given the opportunity kids will stray off track. The internet has many ways of distracting students who should be focused. As I have stated above there are ways to block websites, but you can't block all the websites and constantly monitor all of your students. When you put a kid on the internet and tell them to work, there is so much working against you. All the distractions that are posed make it so much harder for the teachers. Much more effort needs to be put forth to keep the kids on track and this can be considered less efficient. For schooling to be efficient, teachers shouldn't have to worry about their kids goofing off on the web. When presented with a textbook you can be sure that the information that they have access is immediately relevant and they don’t have as much opportunity to become distracted or led astray. “How will you get the information. You can't find all of it in a book, so it is harder to search and type over and over and over again.” - While in more recent years a lot more information has been posted on the internet as opposed to published in physical form. I think it naive to say that you can’t find all of it in a book. Before the internet everything was in books and still to this day, a lot of information we have access to is in a book or derives directly from a book. Also in a pen and paper education, where teachers are using texts provided in class for their lessons and homework assignments, when doing your work and/or research you have a perfect tool for finding your information, in the texts provided to you in addition to all the resources that you have in libraries. Its not like teachers are going to assign you work that requires a lot of digging to find what information you need. “Also without technology we wouldn't be arguing right now. Presentations[,] documents all of that stuff can really [benefit] a student.” - I fail to see how this point is relevant. The fact that we are debating over the internet has no relevance to the efficiency of education systems. Obviously even with all the technology you have access to you haven’t achieve an adequate grasp on grammar and spelling. That brings me into my next point. With the new era of auto-correct, spell and grammar checks. people that grow up with all these things tend to misuse/misunderstand the concepts of grammar. Grammar and subjects similar are all things that require time, patience, and practice to master but with the current age of spell checking people don’t learn these concepts as well as they should. If schools were to focus the majority of their work on the computer then when later in life students have to handwrite formal letters and essays they will not be able to perform as well because they never have to practice it. I agree presentations and documents can really benefit a student, but does that mean that they have to be done online? No. You can have physical presentations to be used in class. Essays can be handwritten or else typed but we don’t have to rely on the internet to have all of our work online. “I don't get why you say online storage is not [effective,] because it is. All of that can really help a student. [So] much more storage FOR LESS WEIGHT. Students do sometimes slack off. But we're talking about how they learn not slack off.”- Online storage is useful but not effective. While it can store millions of files in the cloud, you are putting all of your faith in a server that could, as I phrased it before, lose all of your stuff in the blink of an eye if something were to go wrong. The weight load is not a problem, with consistent managing you don’t need to carry around too many text books at once and in the case of a school with smaller classes teachers will often times give students a book at the beginning of the year to take home and have one for them to use in class. The weight of the resource does not affect how effective it is. Also if students dont focus on their work and slack off then the educational value is significantly less and there for less effective.Lastly for schools to incorporate computers and the internet in everyday learning is a very expensive thing to do. The cost of buying enough computers for a high school to use on a regular basis is high. They also need to be maintained and repaired when things go wrong. Teenagers often tend to ignore the value of things and with students using these computers consistently damage is inevitable. All this adds up and can cost a lot of money.