The Internet and K-12 Education: Capturing Digital Metrics During the COVID-19 Era

Abstract

As districts nationwide transitioned online to deliver remote or hybrid instruction as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet has become an increasingly important space for K-12 students, teachers, and many other stakeholders. This brief discusses the utility of Internet metrics to measure K-12 district websites and its usefulness for exploring the digital nature of K-12 schools. We close this brief by discussing the necessity to explore K-12 Internet metrics, as the Internet has become an important data source for many diverse stakeholders. Keywords K-12 school districts • Internet metrics • Digital metrics • WebsitesEven before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet had forever changed K-12 school districts (Childs & Taylor, 2022;Jones & Figueiredo-Brown, 2018). Yet, the research into the measurement of K-12 school districts has largely remained unchanged. Traditional scholarship regarding measurement of K-12 school districts has primarily focused on physical metrics (students, teachers, classrooms, and schools) or fiscal metrics (per-pupil spending, salaries) (Jabbar, 2015). However, over the past twenty years, school districts have increased their marketing, informational, and advertising presence online, given the way that the Internet has rendered the K-12 landscape a more competitive one (Taylor & Childs, 2020;Childs & Taylor, 2022;Jabbar, 2015). Amplifying the importance of the Internet, COVID-19 has forced many K-12 school districts to shift operations and instruction onto online platforms and environments, rendering it necessary for teachers and students to rely heavily on the Internet to teach and learn (Borup et al., 2020; Childs & Taylor, 2021, 2022.

Teaching Performance of Chemistry Teachers in Chinese Mainland during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Content Analysis Study

“…Compared to other subjects, however, using expository methods and laboratory resources is particularly critical for chemistry teaching, which seems to hardly conduct experiments in online classes. 3 Faced with the closure of classes during the COVID-19 pandemic, we wondered what changes had taken place in school chemistry teaching, in addition to how chemistry teachers (CTs) conducted experiment activities and demonstrated. Specifically, this study aims to explore the characteristic of chemistry teaching activities and distinguish the teaching behavior preference of teachers among three academic stages.…”