5 Ways to Leverage the Internet for your Child’s Education.

The world is more connected than ever and this is all thanks to the internet. Many schools are moving towards online learning to complete classes, submit assignments, and even take tests. In this fast-paced internet world, it is important to make sure that your children are not just staring at the screen, playing games, or visiting adult websites when they should be learning. This is why parents and tutors must learn to maximize the opportunities internet learning presents.

E-learning is the now and future of education, and here are a few ways you can leverage the internet for your child’s learning:

1. Employ Active Learning: One of the key points of learning on the internet is that it has to be active. Some children may not retain anything in an online lecture because the learning management system does not engage them in the learning process. One of the ways to keep the session active is by asking questions, creating quizzes at intervals, and giving graded assignments. This will help your child focus on the lecture with the hope of doing well in the assessments.
2. Create Bitesized learning materials: The attention span for a regular internet user is about 20 seconds and it’s no different for children. Children typically do not learn effectively from long lectures and videos. That’s why to make sure that learning is effective, you point them to short-form content that will capture their attention and hold it for as long as it can.
3. Create a conducive environment for the child: The traditional method of education has worked well over the years and this is due to multiple factors. One of them is that a good environment is curated for the students’ learning. We can take this positive method from a classroom and incorporate it into online learning. You want to create a clean, quiet, and non-distracting environment to simulate a regular classroom so that the child can focus.
4. Cooperative learning: One of the complaints of online learning is the fact that children find it difficult to focus and pay attention while staring at a screen. A way to combat this is to incorporate cooperative learning into the mix i.e modeling. This is a child behavioral management technique where you show a child, someone, doing what you want them to do and enjoying it. For example, when you have two children taking online lessons at the same time, you’re more likely to get more information across because they see the other child taking the same class and they are challenged to stay through.
5. Rewards: Rewards can encourage your child’s good behaviors. The way a teacher, parent, or guardian responds right after a child’s behavior makes the behavior more or less likely to occur. So when the child has cooperated in the learning experience, passed a quiz, or even answered a question, it’s advisable to give a reward so you can encourage such behavior.

Although e-learning is a convenient method of education, each tutor must optimize their teaching methods according to the needs of their students.