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  3. Steve Jobs didn’t think that technology alone could fix what ails American education. It’s worth remembering that in the wake of

Steve Jobs didn’t think that technology alone could fix what ails American education. It’s worth remembering that in the wake of

admin2014-10-24  55
问题     Steve Jobs didn’t think that technology alone could fix what ails American education. It’s worth remembering that in the wake of last week’s coverage of Apple’s new iBooks platform, which the company promises will radically change how students use and experience textbooks. Under Apple’s plan, companies and individuals will be able to self-publish textbooks, ideally creating a wider array of content. Students will be able to download and use these books on their iPad much like they would use a regular textbook.
    Let’s slow down. Textbooks or tools that look a lot like textbooks aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. And since high quality educational material isn’t cheap to generate, simply tearing down distribution barriers will only go so far in reducing the costs of producing good content. Lost in the heated claims, however, is a more fundamental question: what have educational technology efforts accomplished to date and what should we expect?
    As a field, education is easily seduced by technological promises. Textbooks? Thomas Edison saw movies as way to replace them. These days, conservatives are in love with the idea that technology will not only shrink the number of in-classroom teachers but render the teachers’ unions obsolete.
    The experience to date is less grandiose and more worrisome considering the billions that have been spent on technology in schools in the past few decades. Interactive whiteboards have been around since the early 1990s and done little to transform how teachers teach, and computers are often unaligned with classroom instruction, even though 90% of classrooms around the country have them.
    The reasons for the slow pace of change are as obvious as they are stubborn. Altering classroom and school practice in our wildly decentralized education system is always a slow process. Many teachers are not familiar with technology or how to use it in the classroom, and high-quality training programs—either in schools of education or as part of a teachers’ professional development—are rare.
    Besides, even a top-shelf product can only augment live teaching. Likewise, technology is bringing back in vogue the idea of the "flipped classroom" with the teacher acting as a "guide on the side" rather than the primary source of instruction. I say back in vogue because, ironically, talk of devaluing the teacher as content provider has been a fixture of progressive education thought for a century. Another variation of the flipped-classroom idea is to use technology to explain concepts at home and use classroom time differently. But much of the online content available today merely replicates the lame instruction already available in too many of our nation’s schools.
    American education desperately needs an overhaul that goes far beyond upgrading computers in the classroom. Jobs was right: technology by itself won’t fix what ails our schools. He saw teachers’ unions and archaic practices as the big barriers. Perhaps, but I’d argue they are symptoms of our larger inattention to instructional quality. The bells and whistles of technology, for all its promise, are distracting us from this mundane but essential reality.
Which of the following statements about" flipped classroom" is true?
选项 A、The idea of flipped classroom is a completely new concept to revolutionize the way class is organized.
B、The idea of flipped classroom focuses on teachers’ guidance and instruction after class.
C、The idea of flipped classroom is not well enforced now because of the lame instruction at class.
D、The idea of flipped classroom radically changes the traditional role of teachers in classroom.
答案D
解析 文章第五段作者主要讨论了再度风行的“反向课堂”理念的弊端。“反向课堂”理念并不是一个全新的概念，事实上它的核心理念在一个世纪前就已经出现了，故[A]选项错误。它的理念主要是强调教师在教学中不再是教学指导的实施者，而是成为“guide on the side”，学习辅助向导，因此这一理念彻底颠覆了教师在课堂上扮演的传统角色，[D]选项正确。现代“反向课堂”的一个变形就是鼓励学牛自已在家里用技术掌握概念，而课堂上则完成其他教学活动。可见在“反向课堂”中，教师并不是课后对学生进行辅导，仍然是在课堂上开展活动，只是活动本身和传统的课堂活动不太一样，故[B]选项错误。[C]选项利用原文中的lame instruction一词设置干扰，作者在第四段中提到，“反向课堂”效果不佳，原因是目前大多数网络学习都只是走过场，内容不过是教师蹩脚指导的翻版，而不是像[C]选项所说的效果不佳是因为课堂指导不尽如人意。
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