Distance Learning in the K-12 Classroom

How do we learn best?   Any teacher will tell you that direct experience is the best teacher.   Often, classroom teachers will conduct experiments and demonstrations or have the students watch or participate in a variety of experimental activities.   A good teacher is a facilitator and allows the students in the classroom setting to share ideas and explore.   Today, the classroom teacher has something else that has been placed in the classroom that will allow the students to do the same things as in the past. This tool is called hypermedia.   A prime example of powerful hypermedia is the worldwide web, which provides more material than presently exists at most schools' media centers.   As educators, we know that students learn best when they are highly motivated.   Heightened motivation creates an emotional component that increases retention and increases the amount of time the student is engaged with the learning material. Simulations, games, and exploration are used in the classroom today, but they are usually paper-based or board games.   With the computer in the classroom, more sophistication is available.   Our students have become accustomed to sophisticated materials and to sustaining lengthy periods of engagement in them (Notar, Wilson, & Montgomery, 2005).   Everyday thousands of students "traveling" the world through distance learning. Students can now be exposed to people, places and experiences without the traditional restrictions of time and location (Colbert, 2005).   In 1956 Benjamin Bloom developed the taxonomy for the cognitive domain of learning or a linear progression through knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesis to evaluation.   This is what we have come to know as Bloom's Taxonomy.   The classroom teacher focuses on addressing the cognitive levels of knowledge and comprehension as building a foundation for critical thinking, and there are some teachers who work at the application level.   The higher levels of the domain (analysis,... [continues]

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