Distance Education and Virtual Schools

Over the past 2 days, I have looked at various Virtual Schools. Honestly, I am very happy to have done so. Before yesterday, I didn't even know that there were schools like this out there. WAVA was the one I looked at primarily and I was quite impressed. Not only did the school ship out all of the materials the student would need, including books and even microscopes, but there was no charge for the students to take classes "virtually" opposed to in the traditional classroom. I think the 5 best things about virtual schools are:
1) There are less distractions among students because there is no interaction amongst them.
2) Virtual schools can meet the needs of different types of courses through both the teaching methods, as well as the curriculum offered.
3) The students ( and parents ) can chart their own course, this is good because they will be able to have a course that adequately challenges them.
4) They have a very large variety of difficulty in their catalogue, so students can become as prepared as necessary for college education.
5) WAVA is an example of a virtual school system that is free, you can’t beat that.

There are of course, drawbacks of virtual schools, 5 of which are
1) There is less social interaction with students in own grade, social skills may not be adequate for their age.
2) High school students usually spend their whole day at the computer for classes.
3)Students don’t get to talk face to face with a teacher everyday.
4)Students need to be independent, highly motivated, and have parents that are highly committed to their learning
5) Students need someone to stay at home with them, so its not working parent friendly.

I think that a the skills of a teacher teaching in a virtual classroom are very similar to that of one working in a traditional classroom. The main difference being that a teacher in a virtual classroom would need to have more experience working with different computer programs and technologies. But other than that I would believe that they should be hard working, and motivated. They should also have high expectations for all of their students and be able to challenge all of them. The same skills a teacher in regular classroom should have. One way it seems that students gain their social interaction, is via field trips. WAVA made sure potential students knew about the options of going on field trips. I think that this idea isn't that great because students in this setting may not want to go on field trips anyways.

I think that in 2-3 years, schools like this will have a much high enrollment, causing that of traditional classrooms to go down. I think that this is a positive because it puts all of the students in the optimal setting for their academic potential. Some students just don't function as well in a high school setting as they would at home. So schools like this promote more production for them. This type of classroom seems great to me, mainly because of that.