THE WOOS OF TEACHING IN CHINA

I have been teaching in China for 6 years. During that time, I have seen numerous amazing web-based tools come out for education only to become blocked shortly after by the Great Fire Wall (GFW). I have seen many teachers at our school work through a progression of arriving in China excited to try new things, get frustrated as those things don’t work anymore, trying something else, and then that gets blocked. The cycle continues until they start saying things like, “I don’t bother using technology since it is just doesn’t work in China.”

My first response to them is normally, “the internet is a technology not the technology.” My next is to ask them to look at students in the hallway or lunch room…or walking down the stairs. Somehow it seems that the students are able to function just fine with the technology available to them. As educators it is our job to get students to engage in with technology for educational purposes.

As school leaders, it is important to get teachers to use the technology is in a predictable and engaging way. Too often, ever teacher finds something they like leaving it a challenge for students who not only have to learn the content of the course but also a new platform for delivery.

Back to the difficulties of China, last year I experimented with flipping my Chemistry classroom. It was a challenge to work with Chinese limitations but working with the students to meet them and being flexible made for a very successful year. When students had trouble accessing our MOODLE Site, I built a small intranet web-server to allow them access on campus. For students that were day students, I distributed copies of materials to them on USB flash drives.

I find the following infographic really interesting based on my experiences with technology in International Chinese Schools. Unfortunately, I am sure that the tools Chinese Schools are using in the classroom are built with Chinese User Interfaces but maybe some have been translated into English. I would like to track down someone in a traditional Chinese School to talk with this about to see how we could tap in to some of the 70,000 education apps released in China