Saturday, February 15, 2014

Are You Already Outdated for Your Students?

I also want to ask: who seriously believe that locking twenty-five students and an adult in one small room for several hours a day, every day is the best way for students to acquire knowledge?  In China, there are far more than this number in one small classroom. I suffered more than 15 years of this to get into university. When I become a teacher, I do not want to let the next generation to replicate my experience.

I do not mean studying in classrooms is negative. However, the new generation is growing up in a totally different environment, which is more dynamic, colorful and more technical---they are living driven by smart phone, drive through, microwave,download-it-from-the internet,media. I know I must be innovative to keep their interest and to inspire them. Comparing to their spare time, it would be normal to show impatience to lectures for students.

  I really agree one sentence in the video"Educational Change Challenge": if you put a doctor of  a hundred years ago in today`s operating room, she would be lost; yet if you placed a teacher of  a hundred years ago into one of today`s classroom, she would n`t skip a beat. Education model`s change was dwarfed by the great change of technology. Teacher need to exist in the space the students exist, understand their culture.You have no credibility if you are not where they are. Therefore, multimedia teaching is an unavoidable tendency  in nowadays.

4 comments:

  1. I think as teachers, we have the responsibility to keep ourselves updated by the newest information and technology. In that way we can provide with the students the most benefit they can gain from teachers. And using multimedia can not only facilitate the teaching process, but also can trigger the students' interests in learning.

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  2. I was drawn in by your blog title :) I like that you connect your own personal experience with the educational system to how you hope to make it in the future. I agree with you and Liu that it is a teacher's responsibility to keep up-to-date and interesting in their technology usage. Why not use things that students spend a lot of their time on outside of school on, in school?

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  3. Chancy,
    Your so right about a teacher of a hundred years about being placed in a classroom today and totally being able to get by vs a doctor from a hundred years ago and being completely lost by the amount of new technological recourses available in the medical field. I just don't really know why the education field is so far behind on the times when it comes to implementation of technology. Its almost like educators are married to the traditional way of teaching and believe that it should never change. But the problem is that students are not programmed to learn that way anymore and the teaching methods must change in order to meet the learning needs of students in todays classrooms.

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  4. I hope your reflections can guide you as a teacher in the future. From your insights, it certainly looks as if they will.

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