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by Elisabeth Keating, Eugene School District 4J |
Online to the Ural Mountains |
Alice Jagger, a Eugene history teacher, facilitates the War and Peace class. She E-mails assignments to students and then posts questions in the chat room ("Who is the czar? Do you think he is a great man?"). Students discuss the questions, write essays and post them on the list serv, and respond to one another's essays online. For Addie, the experience has been eye-opening: "I've gone to the same school with the same kids since preschool," she says. "Everybody has the same point of view. But now, we're getting two different perspectives on War and Peace. It's like I'm right there in Russia."
Addie also has picked up a lot about what life is like for her Russian counterparts. "I was amazed to learn that there is only one computer for every 500 students. They don't have their own E-mail accounts. I can't even remember what life was like before I got E-mail in the ninth grade. In fact, I don't even think they know what a democrat is!" In the future, Addie's class in Eugene hopes to hook up a video-conference system so they can talk to their Russian classmates.
As Addie's experience demonstrates, online education can break geographic barriers and vastly enrich students' education. It's easy to see why Fawn Bragg, an Oregon English teacher who teaches literature and writing in CyberSchool, calls it "unquestionably the most exciting thing I've been involved with in my twenty years in education."
For more information on the CyberSchool, check out its Website. Details on Oregon certification, payment, and teacher training, are available through Tom Layton.
