Some Good News!
Most of us can’t imagine going to school on the internet. But most of our teens can’t imagine going to school without the internet.
Getting comfortable with online learning would be more difficult for us than it will be for your teen. Because your teen is likely already an internet expert. And in reality, most of them already have at least part of their education online: many high schools use an online platform like Schoology, Google Classroom, Canvas, or a custom site, to track and submit assignments.
Beyond that, most students know how to harness the power of the internet to help them with assignments. They know where to go for help with math, history, science, and just about anything else under the sun. And that’s good – because knowing how to access information is a skill that long outlasts the information itself. Here’s a quick primer for parents so you can (gently) remind them when they forget how to use the internet to do schoolwork.
⊕ Get familiar with your teen’s online school platform. Most of these online systems have both a calendar (that links to assignments) plus individual course ‘sites’ (with syllabi, readings, powerpoint lectures, etc.). Getting comfortable with these sites will help you support your online learner.
→ Have your teen give you a tour of their online portal (a great way to flip the script and let your teen teach you). If your teen isn’t into walking you through this, don’t worry, there are plenty of video tutorials and some systems even offer parental accounts:
- For Schoology
- For Google Classroom
- For Canvas
⊕ Get familiar with Google Docs. Even if your teen isn’t using Google Classroom, most schools and students use Google Docs to write (and even submit) assignments and essays.
→ Learn about Google Docs’s ‘Revision History’, a tool that allows you to see when documents are worked on. This will likely be how teachers track ‘timed writes’ in the future, and also allows you to see when (and if) your teen worked on an assignment. You can see how this tool works here.
⊕ Your teen knows how to access online support for many classes and topics. Far surpassing Wikipedia, there are now sites and groups dedicated to helping students understand everything (seriously). When your teen gets overwhelmed with an assignment, you can gently remind them about these resources.
→ Familiarize yourself with online resources often used by students. These are my personal favorites for working with teens:
- Khan Academy for everything math related (and a surprising amount of everything else, too).
- No Fear Shakespeare for English translations of Shakespeare that your teen will actually understand.
- Amoeba Sisters for great, animated videos that breakdown everything your teen needs to study for Biology.
- Course Hero for chapter summaries of nearly any book your teen may be assigned.
- Crash Course videos for smart and engaging summaries of everything from The Industrial Revolution to Geotechnical Engineering.
These resources I’ve listed are just the tip of the iceberg. Rest assured that any answer you need to help your teen find is out there on a website they probably already use (just ask Dr. Google!). And check back here soon to see my next post in this series (or sign up below).
Be well,
Kaila
Note: Educational researchers know that virtual education can further compound the already existing social disparities that mark marginalized student’s educational worlds. While that is beyond the scope of these posts I encourage you to read about those – and the important work educators and activists are working to combat them. And I encourage those of you who can to donate their time, money, computers, etc. (links forthcoming).