China:Zhejiang
From WAET
Xiaopeng Ni
Department of Educational Psychology and Instructional Technology, University of Georgia
Xuchu ZhouZhuji
Experimental Elementary School, Zhejiang Province
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Lucy, our case study teacher, lives in a small eastern city called Zhuji, in the middle of Zhejiang Province. Lucy is about thirty years old, a mother of a six-year old boy, and has worked as a teacher for more than ten years. She was previously a middle school physics teacher but decided to transfer to an elementary school as an information technology teacher in 2001 during a national movement to implement information technology curriculum in K-12 schools.
Geopolitical Description
Zhejiang province is located in the Yangzhi Delta and plays a significant role in terms of economic and cultural aspects of China. Over 2000 years old, Zhuji is an ancient town and has a population of one hundred thousand people. Annual per capita GDP is approximately US $ 3000 in 2004 (http://www.zhuji.net/ ). Zhuji is also viewed as a rich educational environment. People in Zhuji respect teachers and value education. In the early 1990s, schools in this city had already achieved the nine-year compulsory education required by the Ministry of Education.
Zhuji school district has 217 K-12 schools, 9,000 teachers and 166400 students. Most schools in China are public schools funded and administered by the government, although more recently, private schools have been encouraged. There are, however, only 11 private schools, representing only 10% percent of the students in Zhuji. (http://www.zhuji.net/)
As encouraged by policy, Zhuji has been carrying out the Educational Informatization process. By 2002, 7325 computers had been installed in the city schools and the ratio of students to computers was 22:1. 100% high schools, 98% middle schools, and over 90% of elementary schools in the city have at least one computer lab. Technology has been used for both instruction and administration. A local educational network for the school district (http://www.zjjy.com/index.jsp) has been established for information, communication, and resource sharing. Almost all schools have an Internet connection and an information technology course, which means that they have achieved the basic component of the “Xiaoxiaotong” project. There is a yearly-based competition of CAI courseware, lesson plans, and exemplary classes in the Zhuji school district. A teacher’s skill in using modern educational technology is one important index for assessment and promotion of the teacher. Currently, the direction for Educational Informatization in the Zhuji school district is technology integration and information resource development.
Lucy and her school
Lucy’s school was a newly built experimental school in 1991. The idea of “experimental” schools were developed to foster innovation in teaching and learning; however, in actuality most experimental schools have the same instructional methods and administrative structure as other general schools. Normally, the educational quality of experimental schools is in the middle-upper status. In Lucy’s school, there are both experimental classes and normal classes. The curriculum, texts, instructional activities, assessments are same for both types of classes. Experimental classes generally have a faster instructional pace, and increased course load for students. For example, experimental classes have information technology courses from the first grade, while normal classes start from the third grade, as required by the new national curriculum standard.
Lucy’s school has 81 classes across six grades, 3,515 students, and 187 teachers and staff. Approximately 86% of teachers hold an associates degree. Most younger teachers (those younger than 35) have a basic knowledge of computer and courseware development. Informational technology usage in her school is comparable to other schools in China. Since 2001, the school began to generalize electronic versions of lesson plans. Teachers in an instructional group (teachers who teach the same subject), a common cohort method in China, come to prepare their lesson plans together on every Wednesday nights. The main task of that night is to upload lesson plans to the database on the school network. The news, messages, and notices are posted through the school network. As Lucy described, teachers in her schools have grown accustomed to browsing the school webpage (http://www.zjsyxx.com/) when they arrive at work each morning. Such conscientiousness could be seen as a relatively higher level of informatization in the Zhuji experimental school.
Like many other K-12 teachers in China, Lucy has a heavy workload and often works overtime. She usually arrives at school before 7:15 am and is not able to go home until 5pm, and quite often she needs to bring work home with her. She teaches an information technology course for experimental classes from grades 1 to grade 4, totaling 18 classes each week. She also needs to take care of an interest group, a very common format of extracurricular activity for students in China. As an exemplary teacher, Lucy assists other teachers who are giving public classes in her school district. Every Thursday night she provides a training session for young teachers in her school, which is a kind of school-level professional development.
Although Lucy has a heavy workload, she is very successful. She has produced many excellent projects during four creative years, including lesson plans, courseware, and academic papers. She serves as a chapter editor on an information technology textbook for elementary schools in Zhejiang Province. She has created many exemplary technology integration lessons, like “fairy tale kingdom” and “poem garden”, which are similar to the WebQuest model. Her lesson called “calculator, date, and time” won a national award in the 7th national public show of elementary school informational technology and curricular integration. Her “poem garden” won a first prize on the 7th Grobla Chinese Computers in Education and has been published in its proceedings. Six of her lesson plans were included in a book written by a professor in East China Normal University. To date, she has published 5 papers at both national and regional levels. Her papers entitled “Create an Online Poem Garden, Integrate Teaching in Playing for Whole Development” and “Information Technology Text Material and Teaching Strategy” also won national prizes. In addition, her public class won an excellent class prize and several her courseware examples have won regional prizes.
As a result of her many achievements, Lucy is considered a very successful elementary information technology teacher. When she was asked how she could be so successful, she replied modestly, “It is only lucky. I may see all five petals of Flos Caryophyllata.(which means lucky).” Is it really luck? What makes her classes and teaching exemplary? In the following sections we examine her perceptions about technology, her use of technology, and her concerns about technology integration.
Lucy’s Technology Integration Experience
When asked, “what’s the value of computers in schools in your mind?” She responded, “a computer is just a learning tool like a paper and a pen, and it should be integrated into a student’s learning process and be used to solve a real life problem.” She believes that the goal of an information technology class is not only to teach some basic computer skills, but also to teach using computer to learn. With this assumption in her mind, she tries to transform the content in the information technology textbook to be an authentic, student centered, task-driven, creative, and collaborative activity.
The lesson of “calculator, date, and time” is one unit in a fourth grade textbook. The instructional task of this unit is to teach students to use a calculator application and to set the time and date on a computer. To learn the function and operation of a calculator application is not imaginative, and its instructional outcome is normally not exemplary. So, Lucy transformed this unit and adjusted the instructional sequence. She integrated the unit with the topic of Beijing’s bid to host the 2008 Olympic Game. The successful bid to host the 2008 Olympic Game is one very familiar topic in China, and most children are interested in the topic. In addition, she also integrated the unit with mathematics skills students learn from mathematics classes.
When the class began, she created a context and introduced the task by showing a five minute video when China successfully became the candidate to host the 2008 Olympic Game on July 13, 2001. Lucy then asked students what day is July 13, 2001. The students were unsure. Then she introduced students to the method of solving the problem by using the “date and time properties window”. During this task, she circulated around the room and helped students with problems. Sometimes she had a high-level student demonstrate the skill he or she had used. After most students had finished the first task, a similar task was given to students on how many days were left for the Olympic games to begin in Beijing. A student needs to figure out the formula with the knowledge of mathematics and uses the calculator application to solve the problem. Finally, a small quiz was also used to enforce students’ skills on using the calculator application. In short, students learned designated instructional content by accomplishing a life-related task.
During SARS (a grisly epidemical disease) in 2003, when almost all school activity had been stopped, Lucy organized an online activity “Against SARS. Online Action”. In that very critical time, students were motivated to produce many posters about health and create articles praising hospital workers via the Internet. That is another good example illustrating Lucy’s commitment to the concept that technology integration is intended as a tool to solve problems, and these problems must be authentic, related to real life, and interesting for children at an appropriate psychological level.
Lucy's idea for technology integration is to use the school network as a public showcase and she sees this as a learning activity and an evaluation technique. Evaluation is an important part of the learning process. She believes that students would be more able to achieve excepted learning outcomes through evaluation. Lucy is well aware of this, so she tries to make evaluation a student-centered activity, rather than a teacher-centered activity. She created a BBS, website, as a place where students are able to share their work, to evaluate peer work, and to provide feedback to each other. Her web sites of “fairy tale kingdom”, “poem garden”, and others provide students an online environment to upload and share electronic works and to participate in evaluation activities, including self-assessment, peer assessment, teacher assessment and parental assessment. Some excellent work has a link on the school homepage, so that more students and teachers can visit these works.
The instructional task of “poem garden” is to teach students how to use clip art. In order to teach these skills effectively, she didn’t teach the steps to use the clip art database directly. She realized that playing with poems and pictures is a hobby for most children. As a result, she created a task for the class that required students to match poetry with clip art.
This required two one-hour sessions inside of class and two sessions outside of class. Before the class began, she set up a website on the school network (http://www.zjsyxx.com/syxx/zxc/shigeleyue/index.htm). At the beginning of the class, she used a recorder to play a famous Chinese poem to set up the context. She then told students that “Today, teacher (Lucy referred to herself) wants to bring you to a funny garden. Guess what it is!” After that, she opened the website, “Well, it’s a poem garden. Do you want to go inside and play?” Afterward she introduced the task, “the pixie in the poem garden needs everybody who visits the garden to bring new work.” There was a task list on the webpage. Students had three choices. (a) Use an ancient poem, “Sing for the goose” to create a “song for the goose” picture with clip art, according to the context of the poem; (b) choose a poem you like and create a poster with the poem and clip art; or (c) write your own poem, and match it with clip art. Before students started working on their tasks, Lucy showed an example of using clip art to create a work suitable for the poem garden.
After students had finished, they were asked to publish their work on the website, to read peer work, and to provide feedback. Students also improved their work based on the peer feedback. Parents were also invited to read student work and to give feedback. Most of those activities were placed on the school network. Lucy said that the network has connected students, students and teachers, students and parents, inside and outside class. In sum, she finished the unit by generating a task allowing students to be motivated and using the school network as a public showplace allowing other students, teachers, and parents to participate. The lesson “Fairy Tale Kingdom” is another example using the school webpage as a public showplace. The instructional task of the lesson was to teach Microsoft PowerPoint skills. Lucy once again changed the task of learning PowerPoint to the task of editing a fairy tale and then publishing it online. Students were encouraged to upload their work to the website, and to gain feedback from peers, teachers, and parents. By showing themselves through the network, students improved their skills in PowerPoint as well as the ability to express their own personality. Online web display is an approach at conducting multi-dimensional evaluation and this evaluation becomes an activity to improve the learning process.
Lucy’s Concerns
The first concern Lucy has is that informational technology teachers in China assume much more workload than those in other subjects. The job is heavily loaded with miscellaneous tasks beyond teaching class, such as repairing computers, maintaining the network, developing courseware, tutoring students for contests, preparing computer labs before computerized tests, and more. Especially when teachers in her school district plan to have a public class, Lucy needs to help them. Further, Lucy has developed more than 20 units of courseware in a single semester in 2001. She spent almost every evening at school, and went back home around midnight each night. She kept working for most weekends. Her three-year-old son missed her so much that he cries often, wanting to see her. Often she is completely booked. She expressed her perplexity in a forum, “information technology teacher = developing courseware + fixing computer + maintaining networking.” She believes she should do all this work, however, as an information technology teacher, she emphasized that, “I am a teacher; the focus of my position is teaching and researching.”
Moreover, Lucy feels that information technology teachers frequently are not valued as highly as other subject area teachers. In China, the most important index for measuring school value is based on the proportion of students that enter a higher-level school with a higher academic performance. Such academic performance refers to student performance in language arts, mathematics, English, and science (in the case of elementary schools), or physics, chemistry, and biology, and so on (in case of middle and high schools). Thus teachers in these fields play a major role in the schools, while the information technology teacher is considered second-rank. This is how Lucy feels about her role in her school. Fortunately, one of headmasters in her school is very supportive of using information technology; therefore she feels her position is much better than technology teachers in other schools.
Another frustration in being a technology coordinator is her gender. She confessed that a female teacher or coordinator is not well respected in the field of technology. She once lost a good job position in her school district, and she attributed this loss to being a female. She said that most people believe men perform better in technology than women and as a result expect a male teacher to take technology-related positions.
The future of technology integration
When asked about her thoughts on the current technology integration situation, she expressed that most technology integration is done by information technology teachers or instructional groups. Teachers in other subject areas have done little with integration. She hopes that more teachers with field specialties will attempt greater technology integration.
Lucy suggested that even in some public classes, technology is still used as an assistant tool - in most cases, as a presentation tool only. Using technology as a cognitive tool is what Lucy is expecting for future technology integration. How to generalize this new practice of technology integration is challenging in the current education system. To carry out a broad new implementation of technology integration requires teachers to change their conception of technology. She believes in an information technology society where knowledge is changing everyday, and as a result, instructional philosophy and method should also change. She feels that technology integration is not just a technology issue; teachers’ behavior is influenced by their mental images. So Lucy believes teachers’ ideas about technology should first be updated. She tries to take leadership in this area. She has organized an activity in her instructional group called position report. The method is that each teacher looks for a new instructional method and notion from the Internet and journals and then prepares a PowerPoint presentation for the group activity each Wednesday night. By sharing new ideas, she believes teaching capability will be improved. She is anticipating that a broader nationwide effort toward professional development on new instructional models may be carried out in the future.
When asked what concrete strategy should be used for technology integration classes, she said, “Yu Jiao Yu Le”, which means technology integration should motivate and interest students, and learning should be integrated with pleasure. Teachers should encourage and appreciate students’ creative work, rather than limit students to do what the text demands.
She also expressed her expectation regarding evaluation. She has noticed that many teachers judge student work based on its visual appeal, while the depth of the process and the quality of the work is often ignored. She hopes that teachers could see more essential quality of student work and could use authentic assessment techniques to help students to learn. She also expects that teachers could use the Internet as a public showplace and as an opportunity to change from a teacher-dominated evaluation approach to multi-dimension evaluation approach.
Summary
Regardless of the measure taken, Lucy is an exemplary teacher based on her productive works or inventive uses of technology integration. Her exemplary practice for technology integration may hold promise for many other K-12 teachers to learn and imitate. Her best practices include task-driven, student-centered, authentic, and online displays as multi-dimensional evaluation techniques. Of course, innovation in technology integration is not only about technology and the individual teacher, but also an issue of a system approach as well. In the case of China, we can say that the current instructional paradigm (Kairov paradigm), evaluation system, and limited educational resources are major factors for further change in technology integration. Promisingly, China is becoming more flexible in factors due to its recent economic development and increasingly open policy. There is hope that the system will be more beneficial for a sound approach to technology integration in education for future teachers, students, and schools.
Related Chapters
China
Zhejiang is a province of China.
About the Authors
| Xiaopeng Ni is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Educational Psychology and Instructional Technology at the University of Georgia. Prior to come to US, he got his bachelor degree and master degree in Educational Information Technology at the East China Normal University and worked in the educational technology center at the Suzhou University in China. His current research interests are focused on project- based learning, technology integration, and professional development for instructional designers |  |
Citation
APA Citation: Ni, X. & Zhou, X. (2005). China: Zhejiang. In M. Orey, T. Amiel, & J. McClendon (Eds.), The web almanac of educational technologies. Retrieved <insert date>, from http://www.waet.uga.edu/
