Blended learning in high school

Our society is currently undergoing significant change, caused by the globalization and the transition to a sophisticated technology -based economy and information technology. Therefore, education, including schooling, is obliged to change so that it corresponds to the challenges of the epoch [1]. The new educational paradigm focuses on personality development of a student, creating a need for life-long learning and new competencies acquisition rather than knowledge transition from a teacher to a student. Such a dramatic change in education development vector has induced creating a wide range of new educational algorithms. The most successful among them appear to be various modifications of electronic and blended learning which enrich the traditional educational values [3-5] with psychological, pedagogical and technological capabilities provided by the electronic education [6,7]. Blended learning considerably catalyzes all participants of the educational process and changes the character of the relationship between them from mentoring to cooperation. This article is an attempt to describe the practice of the blended and electronic learning technologies implemented by the staff members of the Pre-University Training Center of the Southern federal university (SFU) in some of school classes in Taganrog, Rostov Region. The project under implementation was named «University E-Class». The project started in September, 2010 [8] within the framework of the national educational initiative “Our new school”. In the academic year of 2010/2011, among the project participants were the students of grade 10 of Taganrog Lyceum №4 (TMOL). In 2012, they became the first graduates of the “E-Class”, confirming by their achievements the project’s promising outlook and vitality. In the academic year of 2012/2013 another «University E-Class» started in the Lyceum №4 and the project expanded throughout Taganrog and beyond. It’s worth mentioning that in the same academic year the NPO “TELESHKOLA” started implementing its own similar project to test and endorse blended learning models in the comprehensive school [9]. As part of our project classroom courses «E-Class» in the Russian language, mathematics, physics and computer science are held in the specialized classrooms of the school or the pre-University training Center of the SFU, where each student is provided with a personal computer with high-speed access to the resources of specialized electronic educational environment (EEE). The curriculum provides the usual number of classroom (face to face) academic hours. Major difference is that during these hours the teacher and all the students can work under the model “1:1» (one computer for one student) on a local area network with modern electronic educational resources using at the same time the services and tools of the educational environment. The main problem, targeted at by our project, is the lack of real educational practice dealing with schoolchildren pre-vocational and vocational education within the framework of electronic educational environment. Today more than 250 students from several schools in Taganrog are involved every year in the «E-Class University» project . Their average exam scores are significantly higher (by 20-45%, depending on the subject) than those of the city, region and Russia as a whole. In addition, the project partially involves several teachers (for certain subjects) and enthusiasts of the city of Taganrog and Volgodonsk, Rostov region, as well as the Volzhsky city of Volgograd region and the city Nizhnekamsk (the Republic of Tatarstan). On their own initiative they submerge their students into our electronic educational environment and systematically use its resources and tools in their educational practice. Having analyzed their feedback we may draw the following conclusions: 1. The students are notably more involved into active learning: their educational activity becomes longer and more intensive; game- and competition-based aspects of the learning process is more evident. 2. The teacher is provided with an instrument, which allows enhancing the efficiency of the student homework as well as their individual and group work in the classroom. 3. Parents can use the remote access mode to supervise all aspects of their children’s academic activity and their results. They can also take an active part in the discussion of the answers to certain tasks, which favorably affects the family relationships. 4. Using the educational model enhances the motivation to study, improves the quality of education and grades up the results of an independent expert quality report of their knowledge. The idea of «E-Class University» is targeted at involving students into active work of acquisition and consolidation of knowledge. The further development of the project may and is to incur the creation of the network-based educational institution of a fundamentally new type - a digital school of the Southern federal university.

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