Challenges and Opportunities. Nervous or Exciting?

The Future Starts Now reminds me of an American journalist called Thomas Friedman who wrote a book called "The World is Flat",

describing the ten world power, among them there is network, particularly the emergence of these new communication tools and learning tools like search engines, blogs, etc. I read that book a little bit before, but back then I didn’t realize technology was such a great skill that as a teacher I need to equip myself with it. Now I believe that this actually becomes a challenge in our life particularly in education, which is how to serve the teaching position in the future.

In the past, it was always teacher-centered, which was just listen to teachers, so independent personality and free of thought seldom excited. And it was always about remembering, students needed to spend a lot of time to remember what they learned from textbooks and also class notes. So since students wouldn’t get interesting knowledge from just remembering, then hard-working was very necessary. So it seemed everything teachers and students did was just for good grades and get into good schools without paying attention to students’ own interests.

But now, with the development of technology, networks and also Social Media Revolution, the memories of knowledge is not the main task of teaching any more. Things are changing now, even my removable hard disk can put entire library of text materials in my pocket. So if we still teach in the old ways then we will find our weakness right away when we face our students of new generations, because the younger people are, the faster they learn, so it’s not likely that we will learn faster than them in this technology age. Thus, we as teachers need to re-define our situation in order to keep our advantages in front of our students.

Thus, what we can do under this circumstances? I think the clue is to be creative. We need to know what knowledge and information we need first, and then how to find these knowledge and information, next, how to deal with them, how to use, in particular, how to create something new. We can get information online so easily with goggling or searching blogs, we then can match these information or add something new so we can use it for our own purpose. It is a process of learning and teaching at the same time, we keep ourselves updated with new technology and information, on the other side we use these technology to help use improve our teaching. And I think only in this way, can we take the opportunities to be better teachers and also not afraid of the upcoming challenges.