It is Teacher's Day today, a "typhoonful" day, which granted me generously a class-free break; I like to write something closely related to teachers, and I don't think there would be anything which is closer to teachers than blackboards at classrooms.
As far as we know, the first teacher who wrote on classroom walls was the Reverend Samuel Reed Hall (1795~1877), an innovative educator and minister who is said to have first written on a peice of dark paper when teaching a mathematics lesson in Rumford, Maine, in 1816. Later Hall moved to Concord, Vermaont, where, it is believed, he had the plaster in his classroom painted black. Soon, many other teachers, following Hall's example, painted plaster walls or plain boards black to create a visual teaching aid. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, enameled walls and then slate boards dominated American classrooms. Hall, who is also credited by American historians with inventing the blackboard eraser and with intrducing many other educational innovations, has been honored by the state of Vermont with a memorial in Concord bearing the inscription including the words "pioneer in the use of the blackboard as a schoolroom appliance".
However, many modern classrooms in Taiwan have access to applying the high-tech teaching aids such as overhead projectors, movie screens, or TV computer monitors for student and teacher use. A few even have electronic whiteboards. Old boards are being allowed to dacay; spaces devoted to boards is decreasing. Yet, with the operating of these high-tech tools, is teaching really becoming more effective?
In my opinion, the board can help teacher manage the classroom, can be a valuable teaching tool, and can be a way to emphasize student input visually. I might as well not to be counted as a conservative though, but I do like ways of simplicity. With a piece of chalk, you can almost instruct any idea as soon as it hits upon your mind to your students on the board. It costs you none on special technological material or skills such as films, DVDs, software programs, transparencies or other stuffs that I can't even give them simple names in normal English; besides, it takes you no time to operate them. Old things don't necessarily mean lousy things. And things invented a century ago can still be very useful in modern times. If you don't think so, then please try not to use condoms with your girls (or boys, oh, sorry for being my rudeness, dear ladies...) next time. They are of aged old inventories from human cultures.
It is time, therefore, that all of us, even teachers who have access to the newest technology, take another look at the humble board. We need to explore teacher use, that is, how the board can be used to help us manage our classrooms and help us teach, and for student use, how the board can help our students learn by giving them more opportunities to generate language, more interaction with their classmates and with us, and more responsibility for their own learning process.
Rearranged from "Teaching Techniques", a book published in China only
As far as we know, the first teacher who wrote on classroom walls was the Reverend Samuel Reed Hall (1795~1877), an innovative educator and minister who is said to have first written on a peice of dark paper when teaching a mathematics lesson in Rumford, Maine, in 1816. Later Hall moved to Concord, Vermaont, where, it is believed, he had the plaster in his classroom painted black. Soon, many other teachers, following Hall's example, painted plaster walls or plain boards black to create a visual teaching aid. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, enameled walls and then slate boards dominated American classrooms. Hall, who is also credited by American historians with inventing the blackboard eraser and with intrducing many other educational innovations, has been honored by the state of Vermont with a memorial in Concord bearing the inscription including the words "pioneer in the use of the blackboard as a schoolroom appliance".
However, many modern classrooms in Taiwan have access to applying the high-tech teaching aids such as overhead projectors, movie screens, or TV computer monitors for student and teacher use. A few even have electronic whiteboards. Old boards are being allowed to dacay; spaces devoted to boards is decreasing. Yet, with the operating of these high-tech tools, is teaching really becoming more effective?
In my opinion, the board can help teacher manage the classroom, can be a valuable teaching tool, and can be a way to emphasize student input visually. I might as well not to be counted as a conservative though, but I do like ways of simplicity. With a piece of chalk, you can almost instruct any idea as soon as it hits upon your mind to your students on the board. It costs you none on special technological material or skills such as films, DVDs, software programs, transparencies or other stuffs that I can't even give them simple names in normal English; besides, it takes you no time to operate them. Old things don't necessarily mean lousy things. And things invented a century ago can still be very useful in modern times. If you don't think so, then please try not to use condoms with your girls (or boys, oh, sorry for being my rudeness, dear ladies...) next time. They are of aged old inventories from human cultures.
It is time, therefore, that all of us, even teachers who have access to the newest technology, take another look at the humble board. We need to explore teacher use, that is, how the board can be used to help us manage our classrooms and help us teach, and for student use, how the board can help our students learn by giving them more opportunities to generate language, more interaction with their classmates and with us, and more responsibility for their own learning process.
Rearranged from "Teaching Techniques", a book published in China only
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