If you haven’t been in a classroom since graduation, then you probably don’t know that in recent years teaching methods in primary and middle schools in Taiwan have changed a lot from years gone by. It’s a whole new atmosphere.

Say goodbye to pasting up character flash cards and breathing in chalk dust! When Chen You’an, a teacher at Taipei Municipal Dahu Elementary School, is in class, he can write, enlarge, move, and erase with ease on the electronic whiteboard.

On a day in early December that is appropriately cloudy, we visit the Tai­pei Municipal Dahu Elementary School to get an up-close look at experimental education using “electronic bookbags.”

The teacher enters the room and all the students stand at attention, then bow respectfully and say hello in unison. The morning ritual of greeting the teacher doesn’t seem to have changed at all. But when the students sit down, the first thing they do is not to open their textbooks, but to turn on the tablet computers on their desks and log in.

The first class is in Chinese literature, and the lesson to be discussed is “the moon in Chinese culture.” The poem “Drinking Alone in the Moonlight” by the Tang-Dynasty poet Li Bai appears simultaneously on the electronic whiteboard attached to the classroom wall and on the screens of the pupils’ computers. When the students have completed reading the poem aloud, following the teacher’s directions they open an electronic file stored in their “bookcase” and begin to read.

Teacher Chen You’an has taken an article entitled “Ancient China and the Moon” and divided it into four parts, then divided the class into groups, and finally—via the computer network—sent different parts of the article to different students within each group. When each student has read the section he or she received, they discuss their parts with the other group members. They then re-assemble the parts according to the logical flow of cause-and-effect relationships or chronological sequences, and end up with the original article, fully restored.

This is a lesson in “making connections” that is part of the “strategies for reading comprehension” being taught in the higher grades at Dahu Elementary School. Just imagine what chaos would result from trying to cut and paste the actual paper!

“This kind of approach revives the interest in learning of students, who have for too long just sat silently in the classroom, hardly involved, like guests at a wedding!” says Li Hualong, director of curriculum at Dahu.

How does it work?

The answer starts with looking around the classroom at all the equipment. There is an electronic whiteboard that has two-way interaction with computers, a digital projector hung from the ceiling, desktop computers, electronic bookbags, mobile battery-recharging carts….

This information technology turns classroom pedagogy on its head. “You can summarize the major differences between digital teaching and traditional teaching in two phrases—from uni-directional to interactive, from passive to active,” says Tian Fu­lian, principal of Kao­hsiung Municipal Zuo­ying Elementary School.

Digital technology can help keep students interested and focused. The photos show an e-book with audio and visual effects from a digital library (top), interactive learning through tablet computers in class (middle), and students enthusiastically raising their hands, hoping to be picked to go up and operate the e-whiteboard (bottom).

Tian extols the many virtues of digital learning. For example, computing and simulation-based learning are only available through IT education, and could never be achieved with traditional pedagogy. Also, through the software named “An An An” (Chinese for “Click Click Click”), students can express their own opinions, and this kind of high interactivity could likewise never be attained in the traditional classroom. Tian stresses that innovative digital education is not simply a matter of entering the contents of paper textbooks into a computer, or of getting cooler graphics like 3D instead of 2D, but creates entirely new possibilities. For example, one of the most important modes of digital instruction is “project-based learning,” in which the teacher assigns the students a theme and then they search the Internet for information and complete the assignment on their own.

Sun Ming­feng, principal of the Min­sheng Junior High School in Tai­pei City, draws our attention to the fact that digital learning not only permits greater vertical interaction between students and teachers, but also increases opportunities for horizontal interaction and cooperative learning among students.

And the evidence so far suggests that the technology has improved grades. Within six weeks after Min­sheng had installed their English class in e-bookbags (which they did in March of 2011), student test results for both vocabulary and grammar had markedly improved. Students’ grades were 20–30% better than they had been in the past, with the greatest progress being made by students who had been performing at intermediate or low levels compared to their peers.

An even more important direction for digital education in the future will be the use of cloud classrooms for remedial or supplementary instruction.

The blueprint for the intelligent school as drawn up by Wu Zong­zhe, principal of the Xing An Elementary School in Tai­pei City, includes a digital environment, innovative pedagogy, cloud interaction, multifaceted evaluations, diagnosis and analysis, and remedial extension. “I hope that every student will have the ability to learn on their own initiative, while the intelligent system will track student progress and red-flag problem students, and teachers can diagnose and solve problems individually with the same level of specialization as doctors.”

T.K. Tien, principal architect and strategist at Intel Taiwan, points out, “Technology can provide an enormous amount of numerical data.” In the cloud classroom of the future, it will be possible to follow the content of what a student is learning and at what speed he or she is learning it, to trace what methods the student is using to learn and what errors he or she is making, and on the basis of this data, to adjust the teaching materials and give the student additional guidance.

Digital technology can help keep students interested and focused. The photos show an e-book with audio and visual effects from a digital library (top), interactive learning through tablet computers in class (middle), and students enthusiastically raising their hands, hoping to be picked to go up and operate the e-whiteboard (bottom).

The trend toward digital education looks unstoppable. But even as the cloud classroom is taking shape, some parents have expressed worries: Could the incidence of nearsightedness increase if children spend all day staring at a computer screen? Will kids become so absorbed in the Internet that the current “digital divide” in the parent-child relationship becomes even wider? And it’s not only parents who worry. A lot of teachers working in the pedagogical front lines also have misunderstandings about this digital “education revolution.”

Misunderstanding 1: Digital education will undermine teachers’ status

Mobile devices make information gathering fast and easy, posing a serious challenge to the traditional teacher lecturing from the podium. Hyper Convergence Foundation CEO Patrick Lee, who closely follows issues related to digital education, says that these days teachers have to be careful what they say, otherwise students with iPhones and iPads in hand can go online and immediately find out if what the teacher is saying is accurate or not.

Although on-campus digital learning is not intended to radically undermine teachers, it has to be said that, faced with students whose digital abilities and computer operating skills are perhaps already ahead of their own, some teachers inevitably will feel a crisis of confidence in their own minds about their role and status.

With the promotion of mobile learning, teachers also sacrifice some control over the choice of teaching materials, and the format changes from a teacher-centered one to a student-centered one. For teachers, this is a tectonic shift.

“The current generation of children are ‘digital natives’ while teachers are just ‘digital immigrants’ recently arrived in this new world,” says Dahu’s curriculum director Li Hua­long. “If you don’t learn how to use IT, you won’t earn the students’ respect,” says Zuo­ying Elementary teacher ­Zhang Yu­fen. It’s not uncommon for the student to be showing the teacher how some of the functions in the e-bookbag work, but this shouldn’t cause any serious damage to the role or functions of the teacher. “After all, teachers have been through a lot more training and have a lot more experience than any student!”

And the new technologies may even make a teacher’s job easier. “In the past when teaching vocabulary, I would have to turn my back on them to write on the board, but with the e-whiteboard and e-bookbags, I can face the students all day long. This is a lot easier for me, and the students won’t dare yawn!” laughs Lin Yu­xuan, a teacher at Zuo­ying Elementary.

“Rather than think of the technology as a substitute for teachers, I prefer to think about ways teachers can integrate with and utilize the technology,” says Dahu Elementary principal Chen Su-lan.

Misunderstanding 2: Digital education is nothing but technology for its own sake

When the e-bookbag first came out, the education community hoped it could help students with a prosaic but all-too-common problem in Taiwan: extraordinarily heavy loads of books carried in the standard school bookbag. But in the early stage, when e-bookbags were not common enough to substantially replace paper textbooks, putting a netbook computer in the bag merely added to the student’s burden. It is only now, with the advent of the tablet computer, and with a growing amount of digital content, that the e-bookbag is again getting attention.

Nonetheless, the functions of the e-bookbag are not limited to simply digitizing textbooks and getting rid of the paper ones. The real key to their importance is in changing the way teachers teach and the way students learn. Patrick Lee reminds us that just because every student has a computer in hand does not mean you have digital education. The keys to the success of digital pedagogy lie in the answers to the questions, “What is being taught?” and “How is it being taught?”

Misunderstanding 3: Digital education will lead to near-sightedness and Internet addiction

The risk that digital education will make nearsightedness in children more likely worries parents perhaps more than anything else. However, testing done over the last few years indicates that student vision has not deteriorated. Moreover, ophthalmologists say that there is only one real cause of nearsightedness in students, and that is that they place their faces too close to what they are reading. As long as the reader maintains an appropriate distance, digital books are no different from paper books.

It is also not likely that there is any relationship between digital education and Internet addiction. T.K. Tien of Intel Taiwan points out that children born in the 1990s have all learned how to use computers outside the classroom, and indeed the gear they have at home is often more advanced than that at school. If a child is addicted to going online, he or she most likely got hooked at home; this problem is not caused by using computers to do classroom assignments.

The Pui Ching Middle School in Macao separately surveyed kindergarten, primary school, and middle school students, and found that 80–90% of the children in each survey said that they knew about, had used, or even owned electronic products. However, most had only used them for playing games. “Children don’t know how to apply the equipment to learn, which is really a shame, and we aim to promote e-learning precisely to address this shortcoming,” says Pui Ching teacher Huang Zhi­zhong.

Say goodbye to pasting up character flash cards and breathing in chalk dust! When Chen You’an, a teacher at Taipei Municipal Dahu Elementary School, is in class, he can write, enlarge, move, and erase with ease on the electronic whiteboard.

Should digital education be further expanded?

Back in 2009, the Ministry of Education designated five schools around the nation as experimental schools for e-bookbag instruction. They added five more schools in 2010, and another 32 joined the trial program starting in August of 2012. At the moment 42 schools in 16 cities and counties are participating in the digital education program, and the number will continue to grow, with a target of 100 institutions by 2015.

Let’s compare this to the blueprints that governments in other countries have drawn up. Korea has announced that it will spend US$2.1 billion to make primary through high-school education in that country completely paperless by the end of 2015. Japan will invest ¥1 billion to provide 10 million primary and middle school students across the country with e-bookbags. The US plans to have complete digitization of all textbooks before 2017. And Thailand, starting in 2012, intends to give every first grader a tablet computer.

In contrast, Taiwan is investing quite a lot fewer resources in digital education.

Will it be enough? “The ability to use digital media is a core capacity for students in the 21st century,” says professor Liu Yuan-chen of the Graduate School of Educational Communications and Technology at National Tai­pei University of Education. He adds that test results over recent years indicate that the introduction of digital instruction is helpful to students’ ability to think critically and resolve problems. If so, this suggests that we should be investing a lot more in digital education.

Ho Rong-guey, director of the Com­puter Center at the Ministry of Education, responds that government resources are limited. The center’s budget of just over NT$1 billion per year has to be distributed fairly. At the current stage, there is no way that digital learning can completely replace traditional learning.

“You can get the hardware installed just by having money, but it will only be effective if corresponding measures are in place,” says Wu Zongzhe. “Even if you gave everyone an iPad tomorrow, what would they do with them?”

What child in Taiwan does not know the torture of carrying bags packed with heavy texts? In the cloud classroom of the future, there will be no paper books, and children will be relieved of the burden of lugging them about, hopefully making the whole learning experience a more relaxed and happy one.

Taiwan has by no means been a late starter in terms of pushing digital technologies. In fact, the Tai­pei City Government launched its program to create a digital city in 2001, and today has the widest Wi-Fi coverage in the world. Much has also been done in the realm of education to promote progressive concepts like the wireless campus, mobile learning, the e-classroom, and intelligent libraries.

Liu Yuan-chen says that formerly the e-bookbags used by schools in Tai­pei City were netbook computers, which were heavy and, at the time, quite expensive. Also at that time there were few software teaching materials and the equipment to get online was not fully in place, so the impact was minimal. But the rise in recent years of tablet computers with touch control screens, which are lighter and continually falling in price, has injected new life into the digital education project.

Nonetheless, Taiwan still has not gone the last mile when it comes to digital education.

“We need a comprehensive computing environment to support the processing and exchange of electronic information.” Zhang Jia­sheng, former director of the Department of Information Technology in the Taipei City Government, suggests that the authorities add more Wi-Fi hotspots, because this can be done cheaply.

The problem of intellectual property rights also urgently needs to be resolved. Wu Zong­zhe contends: “There should be no liability if the materials are used for educational purposes, otherwise there’s going to be a huge mess of problems over IPR infringement.” For example, an elementary school teacher who was assembling her own teaching materials included a children’s song without getting authorization, and ended up getting sued by the composer.

Everyone knows there is no stopping the digital wave, and it will be far better to ride it than to try to swim against it. Surf’s up!

Digital technology can help keep students interested and focused. The photos show an e-book with audio and visual effects from a digital library (top), interactive learning through tablet computers in class (middle), and students enthusiastically raising their hands, hoping to be picked to go up and operate the e-whiteboard (bottom).