Bill Gates' predictions and the reality in China
In his The Road Ahead, Bill Gates depicts a wonderful picture about how IT could change our lives, the way of educaiton in particular. From the inspiring descprition, we are positive about the future of teaching environment. Generally, three facors have been changed. One is the geographical change, the other is the teaching method, the last one is the relationship among students. As a matter of fact, IT technonology has also been adopted by educators in China. Teachers use on line materials for listening and reading. Some teachers make students to hand in the soft copy of the assignments via e-mail. Students have free access to the webs that they think are useful. and most importantly, there is a strong encouragement of student-centered learning and collaborative learning. however, differences also exist. For example, the very traditional chalk-and -blackboard method still work well in the delivery of some courses; teachers still refer to the written textbooks in their teaching,etc. So, in China, IT has not been given a full play.Besides, the biggest sideeffect IT has brought about is the electronic games. young people are crazy for it, students stay up for the whole night playing it. I don't know whether it is typical to China or it is a universal phenomenon.
2 comments:
hi, zhang meng.i agree with you that we may benefit from IT in collaborative learning and individualized learning. however, as a teacher, i am also concerned with the abuse of web by students who may be too indulgent in surfing to live responsibly in real life associated with real people in daily communication.
I like your claim that IT has not been given full play in China.
The year before I came here, I taught the newly revised textbook “college English – Intensive reading” published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. A disk attached to the textbook contained almost all things the teacher needed to prepare for the class, the pre-reading brainstorming activities, the explanation of new vocabulary, the analyses of grammatical points and the post-reading exercises and keys. All teachers who taught this textbook were assigned a multimedia classroom. This was supposed to reduce teachers’ workload and to integrate multimedia materials into ELT class. However, from students’ feedback, we found some didn’t really enjoy or appreciate this change. Now I realize that the problem is not with IT, but with the way people use it. In some classrooms, all the teacher did was just scrolling up and down a page or switching between pages on the computer screen, while students were trying to figure out where the mouse was on the slide. Interaction and collaboration were reduced to minimal or none. Thus, I believe some teachers in China are in urgent need of training on how to integrate IT into ELT, so as to make effective use of available resources.
BTW, I think the computer-game addiction is a universal phenomenon, as human nature doesn’t change geographically.
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