Mentoring+Reflection

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**Reflection on Mentoring** I had a difficult online mentoring experience but I believe it was a successful one. Although I was unable to do much to help my groups, they managed to put together very good presentations. I see a lot of potential in online learning but due to the difficulty I had with it I also see some problems.

When I was doing peer tutoring at Point Loma High School for EDS 129A it was easy to help students because they were right there. If they did not ask for help I could look and see if they really did not need any. That way all the students who needed help got some whether they wanted it or not. With online learning it is not that easy. The most I could do was send messages reminding the students that I was available to help them. The problem was that there was no way for me to check their work and see how they were doing. With online mentoring you are limited to what the student gives you to work with and how much help a student wants. When the students posted their presentation plans I got a better understanding of what direction their projects were heading in and was able to do some research to help them. I sent them some links to some websites that I felt could be helpful. That was about as useful as I was able to be. When they gave me some information to work with I was able to help but aside from that there was not much I could do.

That tells me that for online learning to be successful the students need to be held accountable for their work. Some kind of guidelines and requirements need to be set in place so that teachers or mentors can check up on the students work. If that is done then all students can get the help the need through online learning. I looked through some of the other groups and I saw that there were a few that really had a lot of back and forth going on. Some of the students at High Tech High really took advantage of the help there was available to them. This is why I am optimistic. Online mentoring works it is just a question of setting it up in a way that it works. It cannot be a system where only the more motivated or the more outgoing get help. All students need to get help even the shy ones that may do great work on their own.

After seeing the projects though it seems understandable though why a lot of students might not have wanted or needed help. The projects were extremely hands on and for the most part they were very creative in presenting their information. There were not a lot of scientific facts on the board but instead they were set up as more of an outline, which the students then used to present and explain more of the information. That made me feel like the little I did was therefore about as much as I could have done. I gave them some sources to help them find the information they needed. The rest was more hands on work and that is impossible to help with without direct contact. The projects were good and I feel like I did as much as I could so I believe what I did was successful.

The tools are available for online learning. I am a bit disappointed that I did not get a chance to try and use them towards mentoring but I learned about a lot of Web 2.0 tools that I had no idea existed. I feel like these tools will continue to be improved and will be very helpful towards online learning. The resources are out there and so I think with the right guidelines online learning will continue to grow.

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