Reading report of chapter 2: Sound Education

  As we know, the most imperative area of educational technology is educational design, it refers to a serial of intellectual and pedagogic skills and strategies based on the educators’ experience which could only be implemented and evaluated in teaching. So, how to choose suitable tools which dedicated to the criteria of course and make educational design efficient should be considered essentially before we begin this access.

  Just like the author said, “Teachers often make the mistake of focusing on a particular or enamored tool instead of on the purpose or intended outcomes of a teaching or learning episode.” (page 22, chapter 2) These teachers may just regard the tools as simple tools which could help them accomplish their teaching targets, they won’t consider how to choose the best tools for their purpose and how to apply it in teaching correspondingly because they are getting used to their own particular tool and don’t want to make change on it.

  For example, there is a hot trend in China that teachers always use electronic whiteboard for teaching in most primary and junior or senior high schools, teaching become presentation imperceptibly because of the deep-rooted influence of lecture-style teaching method.

  The electronic white board is a multimedia educational tool which provides functions of writing, drawing, presentation, searching in the Internet, real-time communication and so on. But most teachers just use it for presentation as the supplement of traditional blackboard, what a pity.

  Chinese teacher always follow the vested disciplinarian in educational design which focus on concept design rather than tool design, they may usually design educational tools simply for usage without any considering about implementing corresponding tools on different types of teaching because it won’t take them too much time to prepare teaching.

  Do they not know how to apply corresponding tools for different course purpose? No. They are enable to change, but they don’t want to change. It’s the biggest problem in Chinese teacher education that leads the lack of teaching innovation.

  As the author said, “before you begin any classroom-based social media project, you need to carefully define your purpose, plan the task, select the right tools, and scaffold student learning.” Absolutely, it is the best efficient way to design a social media project, but the problem is that teachers may don’t have enough time to do the whole design themselves.

  So, I think these work should not be accomplished entirely by teachers, they need a cloud collection of different educational tools design ideas and accomplished simulations which cover different grades and subjects from Pre-K to K12 so that they can modify and adjust it to their teaching according to their own real educational condition.

  And this is what we need do, as a contributor of educational technology. We can make a design plan includes specific skills, knowledge, information and write precise statements down, work out suitable episodes according to the plan, choose corresponding tools or service to achieve it, scaffold students learning meticulously and doing a test to check its efficiency and reliability, upload the whole design to the dedicated cloud platform for teachers’ usage at last. What we should do is making teaching easier for teachers.

  It’s really a long-term and challenging hard work for we to do.