Chapter 10: Homework and Practice

In an educational environment, homework and practice are important to the process of learning because they give students the opportunity to review and apply what they have learned. Technology aides in these processes by allowing teachers and students to get the most out of their homework practices. Web Resources, one technology tool, give learners the opportunity to practice and refine skills and concepts form their homes or classrooms. Many students enjoy the educational games they can play as a way to have fun while they are learning. The immediate feedback that they give is just one big advantage to online educational games that can be accessed from a students home, the public library, the school, or anywhere that provides computers with internet access. Our students are “digital natives” and playing games online is second nature to them; it only makes sense for us, as educators, to take advantage of their affinity for this. One web resource that my campus is in the process of acquiring is web-based AR (Renaissance Place), a web based program that tracks student reading comprehension via their independent reading, to allow students to take AR quizzes and earn AR points from home. The current system is server-based, so it has many limitations that include only offering students the opportunity to take AR quizzes from a campus computer. Renaissance Place provides a web based resource for students to complete their reading requirements from home. Like some web resources, however, the migration to Renaissance Place is very costly and that remains our biggest obstacle for acquiring it.
Communication Software is a second technology tool that facilitates with homework and practice. Whereas collaborative projects that require some outside-of-the-classroom time can become cumbersome when the communication is done via e-mail (which involves multiple versions of the same document and each member overwriting one another), communication software makes such collaboration much more organized and streamlined. Writeboard is an internet based computer software that offers multiple users the ability to modify and edit a single document (similar to the way a wiki works), all while allowing users to track the changes that have been made. There are also other free software (like Backpack) that further allow students to work collaboratively by sharing notes, calendars, etc. Such communication software can be implemented in the language arts classroom (or any curriculum content area for that matter) any time that a group project is assigned. Students no longer have to worry about organizing and rearranging their schedules to set up a common meeting time. Group meeting, with the help of communication software, can be conducted at each individual member’s convenience. This is a powerful alternative because it allows group homework and collaborative projects to be done at the convenience of each individual.