8 Questions To Ask Before Putting Your Child Through Online Schooling
This blog post is #13 of a series called COVID-19 Blog Series.
Many parents across the Dallas Fort-Worth Metroplex have been receiving messages from their child’s school district asking the parent to decide whether or not to send their child to school or to have them do their learning online. This is an especially difficult decision to make with all of the uncertainty around the state of COVID-19.
While this post is not designed to give a definite answer to sending a child to school or doing it online, I’ve listed a few things for parents to think about to help them in their consideration.
In this article
5 Questions to Consider Before Choosing Online School
3 Questions You Can Ask Your Child’s School
Final Thoughts from Dr. Sam
5 Big Questions For You To Consider
Is your home set up to help your child learn?
This question is to think about your child’s environment. As we talked about in a previous blog post, there are certain ways that the environment can be set up to help your child learn. These can include a designated area for learning that is separate from the eating, sleeping, or playing areas. Having a designated learning area is ideal as well as designated times for learning as well.
2. Are there a lot of distractions?
One of the main reasons for being conscientious of your child’s environment is to think about the distractions. Expecting your child to be involved in school learning online for several hours may mean that you, as a parent, will have to minimize distractions for several hours. You or your spouse may be working from home and need to be in virtual meetings or make phone calls. Consider the following:
Will these be done so close to your child that your child cannot focus or hear clearly the instruction on their device?
Are there noises and sounds coming from the kitchen?
Are there siblings who can distract your child?
TIP: Setting up a space that is quiet and free from distractions as much as possible is best. As much as the physical location, you can also designate a few quiet hours where everyone knows that it’s school time and everyone agrees to be as quiet as possible. This can include using headphones, taking calls in another room or outside.
3. Do you have reliable access to the internet and technology?
If learning will be done from home, it is important to determine if the internet connection and computer or device is reliable. If the home only has one computer, and it needs to be used by multiple members of your household, then this will be something that needs to be addressed through a schedule or prioritizing. Other things you should ask yourself:
Are there issues when multiple people are using the internet service at the same time?
Are certain locations of the home not good for internet access?
4. Does your child have social interactions outside of school?
One of the most overlooked benefits of school is social interaction. Your child is meeting, talking, and interacting with many different children and adults in the school. Through these interactions, they are learning valuable social skills. If learning will be done online from home, they may miss out on this. This does not mean your child must go meet lots of other people, but social interactions can be done through social media, messaging, or video games that your child may engage in. Small things such as talking to their friends on the phone are ways your child may be holding onto their friendships and maintaining their developing social skills.
“Social interactions can be done through social media, messaging, or video games that your child may engage in.”
5. Are you prepared to be more involved in your child’s learning?
There are so many things to think about for parents when considering in-person school or online school. For the majority of the other specific issues, you will need to be much more involved in your child’s learning at home than at school. As mentioned above, timing and scheduling and distractions are all things to consider as well as monitoring your child’s progress and helping your child with tasks and encouraging your child. This will likely mean that you may have to negotiate your own schedule and structure with your child’s online learning schedule. Thinking about what this could look like ahead of time will allow you to make a more informed decision in regards to your child’s schooling.
CHECKPOINT
Is your home set up for your child to learn?
Are there a lot of distractions?
Do you have reliable access to the internet and technology?
Does your child have social interaction outside of school?
Are you prepared to be more involved in your child’s learning?
Along with the considerations of making your home a better place for learning, there are a few questions you can ask your school or look for in your email or letter in thinking about the decision between in-person or online schooling.
3 Questions You Can Ask Your Child’s School
1. Can you change your mind in regards to the selection of in-person or online schooling?
It is possible that some of you may choose to send your child to school and decide to switch them to online learning due to changes relating to the pandemic. Or vice versa. It is important to know if you can change your decision and if there are limitations to changing your decision, such as when you can change it or how many times you can change your mind.
2. Will online schooling be synchronous or asynchronous?
This might be a new term for some.
Synchronous means the online schooling is happening live on the computer or device.
Asynchronous means it is a recording or there are assignments that can be done at different times.
This will be important to find out, because it can directly influence how you create your schedules at home. Synchronous learning means there is less flexibility in when your child attends online schooling, whereas asynchronous means that time can be set aside at almost any time during the day.
3. What are the timeline and expectations?
This question deals with both the long-term - meaning how long the school is expecting to do online and in-person - as well as the short-term, will online and in-person schooling be the same length of time as before? Also, will teachers be expecting the same level of learning in both in-person and online schooling?
Many parents are wondering if learning will be different or the same across the two settings, because no parent wants their child to fall behind. It is not a simple question to answer as school districts, schools, and even teachers may do things differently both in-person and online. Being aware of what plans the schools and teachers have, and then working on making your home the best learning environment (for both in-person and online) may be the best course of action now.
CHECKPOINT
Can you change your mind in regards to the selection of in-person or online schooling?
Will online schooling be synchronous or asynchronous?
What are the timeline and expectations?
Final Thoughts
This is a lot to think about in addition to issues that may be specific to your home and family. At this time, there is a lot of uncertainty, so it may be hard to find definite answers to many of the questions presented. Keep in mind that this is all very new to schools as well. Meaning, they’ve never had to consider education in a pandemic and have all of their educational activities both in-person and online.
It is my hope that this blog post helps to organize your thoughts and think through what is possible for you at home with online schooling. Also, I hope that you are able to think through how you can enhance the learning environment of your home, which will help your child learn, whether or not they are doing in-person or online schooling.
