The ongoing pandemic has brought with it challenges and changes to every profession, but perhaps none more so than teaching. The classroom of the future, we had long been told, was one that was not bound by geography or everyone needing to be in the same space together. The classroom of the future, it turns out, has arrived – and not just as some amazing technological advance but as a sudden, mandatory and necessary response to the lockdowns, school closures and mass uncertainty that have crashed into our lives.
That education can still go on during all this is a testament to human ingenuity, especially those of teachers. But teaching under these new and unprecedented circumstances raises new issues and new challenges that educators have never had to factor into their teaching before.
In the current climate, technology can be a teacher’s best friend. It allows connection with students and classes that would have previously been impossible to sustain. But technology can also be a teacher’s worst enemy. Simply factoring in the massive distraction of students’ being presented with constant access to the internet – a portal to a little bit of everything, all of the time – can risk a massive impact on student concentration. Couple that with the fact learning from home brings with it issues surrounding a lack of supervision and often an inability for teachers to see what students are doing when they’re supposed to be working, and you have a volatile combination that threatens to make learning untenable at best and completely unworkable at worst.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading comprehension program where students move through five Pre-tests, five Benchmarks and five Post Tests at every level, building mastery of reading comprehension through multiple-choice questions targeting 12 core reading strategies. CARS & STARS Online requires no special computer hardware to operate. It is compatible with almost any device that can connect to the internet. Users can even start an exercise on one device, then login on another and pick it up exactly where they left off. The program requires no further hardware investment for specialist equipment, and there’s no requirement that every student – or teacher, for that matter – has the same type of device.
Its strategies-based instruction is already a new way of thinking about teaching reading comprehension, but its online content delivery and digital workspace is a new way of thinking about the classroom.
Which brings us back to supervision, or rather the problem of supervising students while they work – or pretend to work – from home. With CARS & STARS Online, teachers can view and monitor the activities of each student logged into the program from their own device. This is done by offering teachers a live view of student screens that’s accessible at any time, and works just as well when remote learning as it does when everybody is seated together in the one classroom. We call this Active Classroom, and it’s a standard part of the CARS & STARS Online program that’s available with all subscriptions.
Active Classroom is just one of many features in CARS & STARS Online that give teachers an unprecedented amount of insight – instant and constantly updated – into how their students are progressing with the program while they are working through it, rather than after they’ve submitted their work. With CARS & STARS Online's advanced system of classroom management, one teacher can administer a class in which every student might be at an instructionally different level. From within their Teacher Account, the educator can see the whole class's progress at a glance and instantly target students for instruction based not on grouping but on individual progress.
Active Classroom is especially helpful during instances of remote learning, where it can be the best – and only! – form of supervision available. But it is just one of the many useful features that make CARS & STARS Online the digital reading comprehension program that is ideal for these times – both in the classroom and outside of it.
If you are interested in learning more about the CARS & STARS Online subscriptions and how they can help children to achieve better results, then sign up for a free trial to be an integral part of your child’s reading success.
