B. Nesbitt, the writer and producer, was really worked hard in this video---not only in the weaving a plot, but also in the standpoint he want to transfer. His video inspires me a lot. In my prior view, technology is just tools or skills that help the students to improve their language level. But Nesbitt created this project to inspire teachers to use technology in engaging ways to help students develop higher level thinking skills. And equally important, it serves to motivate district level leaders to provide teachers with the tools and training to do so.
At the beginning of the video, various modern media show up in turn such as e-mail, computer, mobile phone and then a boy take a white board with the words “I am a 21st century learner!”. Yes, definitely right! Nowadays the children not just read the paper books, they more prefer to use electronic productions like video games, TV, MP3. And these are more acceptable and convenient to the young people, especially the wide-used of Internet. What’s more, most of the young people willing to develop or show their personalities to the public. Therefore, these on-line tools offer them a good suitable platform to share information with each other.
But unfortunately, 76% of a boy’s teacher has never used e-mail, text, instant message or even blogs. Meanwhile, some statistics shows that there is just minorities of teachers use modern technologies such as wikis, blogs, podcasts. And these phenomenon lead to students questioned that what kind of education would teacher want them to have? The answer, of course, is vary from person to person, but, teachers still should focus on the need of children.
At the middle of the video, the screen shows that “By the year 2011, the largest English speaking country --- will be China!”;“There are more honor students in China than there are people in North America”. Actually, I don’t understand why Nesbitt insert these 2 sentences. Does he want to emphasize the strong spread of Internet or the importance of English? Whatever, that we should know is how will these help us; how could these help us? Teachers should make good use of these technologies and teach children to think, to create, to analyze, to evaluate. Time has changed! Now we are all digital learners!
1 comment:
You pose an interesting question about why the author of the video mentioned the large number of English-speakers in China and the high number of honor students. I think, perhaps, he wanted to shock native-English speaking viewers into realizing that the education of their 21 century learners is serious business in today's economically competitive world.
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