Chinese city introduces tablets in classroom

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A tablet can be a good tool to help poor people receive better education. But it's also possible for the technology to benefit every student.

Starting from this semester, seven classes of pupils in an eastern Chinese city will be going to school with Android tablets, which the school hopes will boost students' performance.

The adoption of tablets is an experiment taken by Qingdao Bowen Elementary School, a private school trying hard to compete with its powerful public rivals.

Students using tablets at school /CCTV Photo

How it works

They use a cloud-based software platform to build better classroom experience.

On the students' side, it's just an Android app that can be installed on any tablet. Connect to WiFi, login to the app and it's all set.

On the teachers' side, it's more complicated, because they need to manage a whole room of pupils.

During work hour, the teacher can present multimedia contents to the class, instead of just writing on a board with chalks.

In addition to that, in-class assignments can be distributed on the platform, too, where the teacher can even monitor the students' progress.

A monitor in a class shows the progress of students' assignments. /CCTV Photo

"I can see which students are slower on an assignment and provide help accordingly," said Wang Zhenzhu, a teacher from the school.

"I can pin-point the children's weakness now. It's convenient," Wang added.

When the class ends, the system can automatically generate homeworks. All students receive different homeworks, depending on their performance in the class on the day.

According to school faculties, the students using tablet computers are doing better at reading.

The worries

Parents, however, remain concerned over the use of tablets in school. They worry that:

– The school may use this as an excuse to force parents pay for overpriced tablets;

– If a student looks at a screen for too long, it may damage his/her eyes;

– School children may accidentally navigate to harmful websites;

– The input methods of Chinese characters on tablets are based on the sound of the language. This may make it hard for students to correctly remember the shapes of the characters.

A student trying to write a Chinese character meaning "this" on a tablet computer. /CCTV Photo‍

Those can be the reasons why mobile technology has not been widely applied in the education area.