More and more people, students and teachers, are beginning to use to the internet to aid education, as there are a wide variety of resources available, and you are able to demonstrate things using videos etc.- something you would not be able to do when just using books.
One of the most popular and useful ways of using the internet for education is through videos. This allows you watch demonstrations, as well as allowing people who learn better through vision or audio rather than reading, to fully understand what they are learning.
However, sometimes websites such as YouTube are not available in school, as they can have unsuitable content on them, so schools block them. This creates problems for students who need to watch videos, as they have to wait until they get home.
Personally, I use YouTube quite a lot, as I find I learn things a lot faster when someone is talking through the points and demonstrating them, rather than just reading a book, but I do encounter problems when I need to use it in school.
Research
The internet is extremely useful for researching different topics, as there are normally millions of results when a topic is typed into a search engine, giving you more than enough information. Sites such as Wikipedia are widely used, as they will most likely have a lot of information on them, however, as Wikipedia is a website that can be edited by anybody, there is no guarantee that the information you are receiving is correct. There are also sites dedicated to students, such as BBC Bitesize for revision. This allows students to search for things according to the subject, the topic and the year group they are in.
This is the BBC Bitesize home page, which asks you to select which year group you are in, so that you can access the appropriate things.
However, BBC Bitesize only goes as far as GCSE level, meaning that you cannot use it for help with anything higher than that such as A-Levels.
Personally, I try to avoid using websites like Wikipedia, as I know that the information is not always correct, therefore I would rather not use it in a piece of school work, and I can no longer use BBC Bitesize as it does not provide information for A-Levels.
MyMaths
MyMaths is a very widely used website across schools, as it allows teachers to use it to aid their lessons, and it also allows students to access it from home to help them with their homework or complete online tasks that their teacher has set, and submit it to them electronically. It also marks the work for you, so that students know straight away how they did and what they need to revise. This also means that teachers do not have to go through the process of marking the same homework over and over again. Another good feature of My Maths is that no two students will get set the same questions. It will be on the same topic, but the actual questinos will differ, eliminating the possibility of students copying others.
However, not all students will have decent internet access, meaning that they cannot get on the website and do the work that is set, like they would be able to if they were using a textbook. It also raises the question of the need for actual books- if we get to a point where everyone has internet access whereever they live, then surely all work could be set online and therefor books will not be needed for much longer.
Personally, I used MyMaths several times in the lower school, and while i thought the actual idea of it was good, it didn’t always work for me, as sometimes the website would freeze and make it impossible for me to complete the work that was set. It also made it a lot easier to make mistakes, as it is very easy to type in the wrong answer without realising. It would also cause problems if you didn’t know how the website worked exactly, as you have to go through a process of getting it marked then submitting it to your teacher, and unless someone has taught you exactly how to use it, this could prove difficult.
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