In February, I talked with approximately 1000 teachers in Fukuoka, Okayama, Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo as part of the OUP Teaching Workshop Series. Workshop titles were assigned to fit an acronym. I was the “I” in K.I.D.S.—Interactive Ideas for Keeping your English Classes Relevant for the 21st century. The challenge for me was how to make technology tools relevant for teachers who don’t have computers in their classrooms.
If you hang out with teachers online, it’s easy to forget that the majority of teachers in the world—especially those working with young learners—do not have computers, much less internet, in their classrooms. If you are interested to see how the presentation turned out, you’re welcome to look at the slides and examples on my wiki.
This picture is an example from my workshop of a Voicethread book about favorites. I like Voicethread because it allows teachers to work on a project in class, without internet. It also allows teachers to save projects in a format that’s friendly for cell phones.
Here are the teachers from the Tokyo workshop using imaginary microphones to record comments to add to the Favorites Voicethread book.
In each workshop, I asked teachers about what sorts of technology they had available to them at home, and in their classrooms. A show of hands is far from a scientific survey, but the results jive with my own observations as well.
Approximately 60% of the teachers have cell phones. About 50% of them believe that their students also have cell phones (children don’t generally get cell phones until upper elementary grades). The majority of students who access the internet access it from a cell phone, not from a computer. About 50% of the teachers have computers at home, and most them also have an internet connection of some kind. Just 2% have computers in their classrooms. The number of these teachers who have both computers and internet in their classrooms is less than 1%–one or two hands raised per workshop. The teachers who have access to both computers and internet at school teach at international schools, or private elementary schools.
While this was a reality check for the state of technology access in Japanese schools, it was also a welcome reminder of the dedication teachers show for their own professional development (spending Sundays at workshops they aren’t required to attend) and their enthusiasm for new ideas. Since the workshops, teachers have been slowly making their way into online communities. They’re also moving beyond the workshop basics and coming up with ingenious ways to use technology to enhance their teaching, even if they don’t have computers in class.