Online homework has its positives and negatives to it. One positive is that it saves time for the teacher when grading homework. Online homework programs grade the students homework electronically and the teachers can put the results directly into their grade book. The teachers will have the ability to see who truly completed the homework before the class starts. This will allow the teacher to know who completing their work at home before school starts. Online homework also saves the teacher time in the classroom because she does not have to walk around and check who did their homework and then collect it if she pleases.
Online homework can also be bad, this is because it is very easy for students to guess the correct answer or cheat on it to get a good grade. One way this can be done is looking at the examples that are given with the question and the students just plugging in their numbers instead of the numbers in the example. This is not good because the students are not truly trying to solve the problems on their own for practice. Another way you can cheat on the online homework is by putting the wrong answer in on purpose so that the computer gives you the correct answer. Lastly many of the web-assign questions can be found on google, where students can easily look up the correct answer. Unlike written homework there is no work to prove that the child did the correct computations to solve the problem on their own.
Another negative of online homework is input issues. Many times the student will have the correct answer but type it in differently than the computer wanted and it will be wrong. This will give that student the idea that he is solving the problem wrong when he may be right.
I am not 100% against online homework but if I was to use it in my classroom I would ask my students to bring in their work on a separate piece of paper to hand into me so that I can make sure my students are really doing the work and that they are doing it correctly.
I agree with you that there are many negatives and positives to the online homework. I think you kind of contradict yourself when you said that you would ask your students to bring in their work, so that you can check it. You are basically giving yourself extra work to do because in addition to posting the homework online, now you have to check their work. I thought you try to avoid doing that, and save yourself some time so that you are using the online homework. I'm not against using online homework, but if I were you, I would just assign the regular homework, where they would have to show all their work, and then post optional online homework, where students can do it for additional practice and extra credit.
ReplyDeleteMichelle, I agree with you online homework could be both bad and good. However, for math I feel that online homework could be a bit difficult. I remember taking pre-calculus and having homework online on web assign. Although, it is probably more convenient for the teachers sometimes I had a difficult time sometimes, because I would input the correct answer and because I did not do it in the format the website expected me to, it marked my answer incorrect. Even though I did not like it much it did have its positives. For example, I liked how most questions had a tutorial video for a similar problem. This could help out a lot of students if they do not know how to approach the problem at all. So even though there are negatives and positives it all depends on the specific topic being covered and how the students feel about it also.
ReplyDeleteMichelle,
ReplyDeleteI agree that online homework is very controversial, but I truly believe that the good outweighs the bad. I remember doing a lot of online homework in the beginning of my college career and even when I used the guessing method which you referred to I was learning. This was because I needed to figure out the process involved in order to make an educated guess. So in the end I may have actually learned more. This was a great post though because it is a very controversial topic.
I do agree that there can be some positive aspects to online homework, but only to those who truelly want to excell. Students who want to do well in the class and are interested in the material will take their time to complee the assignment. On the other hand students who do not care too much about the subject will complete it as fast as they could to just get it done. This will probably result them in copying other students' work or looking up the answers online rather than answering it themselves.
ReplyDeleteI think you have several good points for using this technology such as view who has completed the homework and easy grading. In some respects I see how this can be a dis advantage to students especially this students who complete homework at before care programs, which i have seen working at such a program, where computers are not available. Sometimes it is not completely the students fault but parents and busy home schedules. Another advantage would be that there is not more excuses say " I forgot to bring my homework home, or I lost my homework". I have seen many occasions where students loose or forget homework purposely. This will eliminate that problem but may create other issues. Some students may not have the funds at home to own a computer!
ReplyDeleteI find your point valid, Michelle, and I understand full well the limitations and drawbacks of on-line homework because I myself have Googled answers to questions just as you mentioned. However, I must admit that Googling the answers actually helped me better understand how to work through many of the problems I've had on WebAssign, because I was not one of those students who only wanted the answers, but I wanted to learn and actually took the time to understand the offered explanations for those answers. So for myself, I would most definitely employ WebAssign or similar on-line programs, but to prevent students from Googling all the answers, I would ensure that I do not provide questions that they are not comfortable or familiar with yet, so that they end up asking me for help first, and ultimately use the on-line program to supplement my teaching.
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