So these two items came across my electronic desk late last week from the folks at Education Week.
I have to be honest and say that it was the pandemic, and the experiences that we saw during those periods of remote learning, was the reason these items caught my attention. For those who simply haven’t been paying attention, those jurisdictions that has a robust online learning program, coupled with the use of legacy tools like correspondence education packets, educational radio, and instructional television, were able to provide a more accessible form of remote learning that the many, many jurisdictions that simply moved online or – even worse – just engaged in “Zoom school.”
These two articles would seem to suggest that when it comes to reading for content-based understanding, that reading from the screen may be inferior to reading from a hard copy of the text. Regardless of whether that is the case, or under what conditions and circumstances that may be the case, it underscores the notion that a robust distance learning program doesn’t have to be – and potential simply shouldn’t be – completely online.
