Beyond The Classroom Walls Analysis

Summary:

Teaching is a never-ending cycle of evolution. Through this process, teachers are faced with obstacles on a daily basis to reach their students in any particular class. One major hurdle is the face that students’ academic diversity plays a large part in the content teachers can cover in their classes. Grouping students heterogeneously or homogeneously in a classroom is a topic for another day. But, what if academically gifted students could be placed in a program(s) where they could work on student centered projects, while working at their own pace, and on their own time? In the article “Beyond the Classroom Walls” both teachers and students who had previously taken or taught at least one online course, were surveyed as to why

If those students are not reached they can become bored, disconnected in the classroom, or worse become to dislike the academic setting. One-way to negate that is by incorporating online learning to the classroom. In “Conceptualizing the use of Online Technologies for Gifted Secondary Students” Ng and Nicolas describe how these students that potentially can become isolated, can now be a part of an online learning community. In a classroom there are times when gifted students are not being pushed, however, in an online course, these same students can identify their own challenges and then manage their own learning from there. “Students are motivated to learn with technology because it gives them ownership and control over their learning in terms of pace and content.” (Ng and Nicolas) Through qualitative research Ng and Nicolas demonstrate how online learning can be beneficial for gifted students more so then the tradition classroom. The reliability of the study is mediocre since they are only observing a small number of students, however, the validity is high since they are sampling a specific group of

Teaching in the middle school setting, I interact with a number of gifted students on a daily basis. Those interactions deal with American History content, to what they have done in their Gifted Classroom. A number of times the students have stated that they do not do much in their gifted class. Well, if we had the option for students to enroll in some for of gifted class on line, I think that would be very beneficial to them. Possibly, the history department could put together a program for those students that have complete their coursework for the grade they are in. Once they have finished they would be allowed to work on predetermined lessons that are online dealing with different parts of