Online services in education

The advent of online services has revolutionised the way education is taught in school.  With the use of the internet being more commonplace in schools it leads to many advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages are that pupils can now use revision sites like BBC Bitesize or online work providers like MyMaths to do revision and homework online now as opposed to revising from books  and writing out worksheets. The online services also make life easier for teachers and examiners as online services now allow examiners and teachers to mark peoples work and exams online. Exam boards such as EDEXCEL now use online services to mark student’s work. Many sites which use online services are interactive which allow education to be taught to pupils in a more entertaining way rather than having them just read from a book or whiteboard.

The disadvantages are that with sites such as Wikipedia which advertise themselves as being free encyclopaedias and do offer a lot of information. They however are sometimes unreliable and some information on there needs to be crosschecked with another website to determinate if it’s factual content or if it’s actually terminological inexactitude. Sites like Wikipedia also make it easier to plagiarize someone else’s work and pass it off as your own as the ability to cut and paste makes it easier to copy someone else’s work without crediting them for it. Such a practice is against the law but people have got around that by using the online services to pay someone else to write work for them. This is legal in a sense as it is a contract but if the information was used in a CV (or something similar) that would be misrepresentation which is illegal as you’d be passing that work off as your own through being economical with the truth.

Online services also offer to education several resources which are easier and more accessible to teachers and pupils. Online services now allow people to download worksheets from the internet as well as lesson plans for teachers and help with coursework for pupils. Chat rooms are helped by the advent of online services in education as there are certain educational based chart rooms now. One of them is the Student Room; the student room allows pupils to share information freely and discuss topics with each other as well as debate over certain issues. Youtube is also used as an online resource by teachers to show demonstrations to pupils that they can’t do at that point in time. This has a disadvantage as if pupils used it they could look at something irrelevant to their education which is why many schools block students from using them. A V.L.E, Virtual learning environment such as Frog is a system using online services that allow students, teachers and parents to have the ability to check on the pupil’s progress as well as update any assessments and any behavioural issues.