Op/Ed

Plato Isn’t Helping as Well as We’d Like it to

The Website Poses Many Problems for Online School

Reporter Ashley Howle

Thanks to the worldwide Coronavirus pandemic and the crisis the world is going through, we are stuck in a shutdown. That’s a no-brainer to anybody. But now that the shutdown is in session, and schools all across the country are cancelled, staff has to resort to different methods of getting material out to their students. And for GHS, they have settled on the use of a website known as Plato. While it is information-filled and online, varying in different assignments and subjects, it isn’t really helping with grades.

When you begin your units on Plato, right away you’ll notice there’s little to no visual learning. Students have different ways of learning and retaining information, so when something like this comes along, it proves to be much harder for certain students to use. Either you read and take in the information, or you write it down. That’s it. You also can’t question anything, as there’s no teacher there to help.

Plato also serves as a problem in online learning due to its faulty saving abilities. The one way you’ll be able to salvage work through your tutorials is through writing constant notes on the subject, that way the program autosaves your work so far. However, if you’re not doing that, you could end up losing work during one of the many questions that comes up. This depends on if the website thinks you might be on a question for too long, even if the question encourages a lengthy amount of time to work on it, or if you turn off your computer. The program restarts itself and kicks you out of your course, deleting either a simple answer to a question or an entire essay.

I don’t blame staff for choosing Plato as students’ main platform for learning, but when it comes to faults like these in the program, hopefully teachers, parents, or any other kind of person will understand students’ struggles and low grades. Plato is at least a decent learning platform, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise if students end up with low grades by the end of the year.