The Road Ahead

In Bill Gate's Information Highway", this man of vision successfully laid out the blueprint for today's four areas of education-related multimedia experiences – networks, classroom environment, digital white boards and multimedia. As a College English teacher in China, I reflect on my own classroom teaching experiences and find many similarities with as well as differences from Gate's prophecy.

First and foremost, the application of multimedia in common language classroom is growing wider than ever in my university. The traditional chalk-and-blackboard classrooms have been completely taken over by multimedia classrooms, which at least consist of a tape recorder, a computer and a projector. Hardcopy books are no longer the only course materials in the classrooms. Power-point slides, audio and video clips from the internet, CDs and DVDs are empowering language teachers with a wide variety of channels to present their lectures. Even students are quickly adapting to the new technology tool. They are able to create presentations with multimedia content in the individual or group projects.

Besides, networks are facilitating and promoting classroom teaching with more means of outside classroom communication between teachers and students. With the help of email and messenger service (Windows Live Messenger, for example), teacher's personal space, FTP, virtual alumni community, communication becomes more efficient and therefore, more frequent. Information sharing has become easier and faster than ever. Teachers are able to scaffold students in many ways that had never been dreamed of before.

However, the digital white board mentioned by Gates is still unavailable in my university. Due to the absence of the interactive whiteboard, my colleagues and I have to cope with the dilemma of combining the use of blackboard and projector at the same time. But the problem is once the PPT is done, we are not able to do any in-class changes according to the reactions of students. It is difficult for us to highlight any particular parts of our slides. So we are really looking forward to the "chalk-less" classroom, where the advantages of blackboard are incorporated into the interactive whiteboard as well.

And the large number of college students in every Chinese university is also posing a serious problem to language teachers in incorporating IT into their classroom. In NIE for example, the E-learning week is possible for every student enjoys the free access to computers and internet. But it is not so in China. Even the best Chinese university cannot guarantee every student has the free access to internet any time they want. If this problem cannot be solved, only those few who are rich enough to afford to have access to these sources are the real beneficiaries.

In sum, it is true that language teachers in my university are benefiting from the latest development of IT, but problems and challenges still exist. The Road Ahead is a promising one but a long one, too.

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