On the evening of October 12, 2022, the "New Digital Era, Great Educational Future" XIX SHANGHAI EDUEXPO brought its live broadcasting on Education in Shanghai to Putuo District.
Wang Yu, Vice Governor of Putuo District, Ji Hongxu, Party Secretary and Principal of Jinyuan Senior High School, Miao Yanan, Vice President of Putuo District Education Institute, Yan Yongmin, Party Secretary and Principal of Caoyang Experimental Primary School, Qiu Zhiyun, teacher from No.2 Secondary School Affiliated to Tongji University, Wang Weina, teacher from Caoyang Vocational School, and Guo Ling, teacher from the Putuo District Youth Education Activity Center, were guests in the studio to talk with the host about how digital technology empowers Putuo to develop "suitable education".
Focusing on "Four News" to develop "suitable education"
Putuo District has a big population, with more than 110,000 primary and secondary school students and kindergarten children. In the live broadcasting, Vice District Governor Wang Yu revealed that during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, Putuo put forward the development idea of "suitable education" centering on the goal of building the district into "a dynamic area for innovative development and an area of beautiful quality life" and carrying forward the spirit of "reliable people, effective implementation". Basic education in Putuo District aims to provide every child with fair and quality education and more importantly, every student with "suitable" education, so that they can learn to grow up. It will also provide students with the ability to learn for life and the opportunity to live a splendid life.
In recent years, Putuo District has been stepping up its efforts to build "Digital Putuo" with regional influence and establish a "Putuo Laboratory" for urban digital transformation, of which digital educational transformation is an important part. Currently, the digital transformation of education in the district is focused on "four news", namely: developing "new infrastructure" for Digital Putuo, creating a "new engine" of educational data, expanding "new scenarios" of digital applications, and improving "new effectiveness" of digital governance. The "Four News" may sound quite abstract to the public. In fact, when it comes down to education and teaching, these “Four News” specifically fall on three key points: curriculum, resources, and evaluation. Starting from these three key points, Putuo is gradually creating a new digital education ecosystem under the "suitable education” philosophy
Case 1: Anatomy Class Available Online
During online teaching in the first half of this year, Qiu Zhiyun and Qian Jun, both were teachers at No.2 Secondary School Affiliated to Tongji University, started the online anatomy course Observing and Dissecting Crucian Carp. In the usual offline class, students would dissect the fish according to the preset steps. After changing to online class, students needed to convert the original anatomy task into multiple small tasks such as fish acquisition, fish breeding, tool preparation, fish anatomy and result upload, and complete them one by one. Each link had multiple special challenges. The students needed to firstly obtain and feed fish at home, and find various alternative experimental tools. Some students in the anatomy class on the day were invited to broadcast the anatomy process as the host, while other students could better master the anatomy skills through observation and course re-play. In the dissection process, the students were likely to encounter various other problems, such as "what if the fish is jumping all the time?", "where to find the heart", etc. Although teachers were on hand to provide online guidance, the students had to solve the problems themselves. After the dissection class was over, the students uploaded photos of their results to the operation platform for discussion, and they were very happy to see their results online. In the whole process, the accompany and help of family members also made the students realize the importance of family, which promoted a more harmonious family relationship.
Case 2: Family-School Integration Can Be Equally Promoted Online
Wang Weina, a teacher from Caoyang Vocational School, said that online classes could indeed have a positive effect on promoting family-school integration and stimulating parents' enthusiasm for participating. It turned out that parents had no idea about what children learned and did in the offline classes. By contrast, during the Covid lockdowns, parents were able to see clearly what their children did and how they did. They also knew where the problems were. Some parents even became interested themselves after watching what their children did. So, they learned and did the experiment together. When parents and children participated in the learning process, the online classes not only enabled the students to learn knowledge, but also brought parents and children closer. "In the online classes, we are more student-centered and use multiple platforms to create smart classrooms, carry out pre-class, in-class and after-class teaching activities, and achieve phased growth for our students," said Wang Weina.
Case 3: Digitalization Boosts "Double Reduction" in Schools
"To implement ‘burden reduction’, apart from reducing the burden of homework and after-school tutoring, the more important thing is to change the educational model, so that people can truly feel the effect of ‘burden reduction’. This tests not only the management ability of the administrative department, but also the professional wisdom of front-line teachers," said Vice District Governor Wang Yu. As a professional support department, Putuo District Education Institute has long been endeavoring to improve the quality of homework and the efficiency of classroom teaching through information technology in recent years.
In the live broadcasting, Miao Yanan, Vice President of Putuo District Education Institute, shared a set of data on the online filing system for primary school homework in Putuo District. The system mainly consists of 15 design teams that are composed of district subject teachers and researchers, district subject backbone teams and backbone teachers at base schools, which develop the homework according to the curriculum standards. According to the teaching schedules, the 15 design teams release homework on the information website two weeks in advance, and the schools organize their subject teachers to download the homework for study and ensure their students do the homework, while exercising effective control over homework "quantity and quality". The filing system benefits more than 1,800 teachers of Chinese language, mathematics and English, and nearly 40,000 pupils in the district.
Case 4: Digitalization Helps "Double Increase" Off Campus
Extra-school educational institutions have also been thinking about how to make good use of the extra time available to children from the “education burden reduction” drive, how to give children more course choices and more resources, and how to effectively implement "double increase" under the current "double reduction" situation. According to Guo Ling, a teacher at the Putuo District Youth Education Activity Center, the center has, under the spur of education transformation and the test of the pandemic situation, opened up a new online field and built a children's palace on cloud according to students’ different cognitive characteristics and interest at different stages. Taking the weekend as the cut-in point and "fun" and "new" as the starting point, the center has attracted children by “fun plays”, led them to play through doing and learn by playing, and get skills and harvest growth in a relaxed and happy atmosphere. At the same time, it has carried out all-round information management for mini-classes, activities and competitions, presented them in a transparent way, and constantly provided children with after-school education characterized by high-end learning experience, high-level content adaptation and high teaching efficiency in after-school education.
Case 5: Growth Archives Foster Three-dimensional Assessment
Putuo's "Fourteenth Five Year Education Plan" focused on "suitable education", and the new path of digitally empowered “Five Educations” integrated with "smart evaluation" can provide "smart" support for the development of "suitable education". The digital comprehensive evaluation platform established by Caoyang Experimental Primary School is called "eBao Growth Archives", whose original intention is to visualize the dynamic growth process of children with the help of technology, so that such growth is visible. At the same time, it is also hoped that through data empowerment, every teacher and each parent can learn as much as possible about the multiple aspects of a child, so as to provide more suitable education for children. In the live broadcasting, Yan Yongmin, Party Secretary and Principal of Caoyang Experimental Primary School, said that the iterated eBao Growth Archives 3.0 would explore the change from multi-dimensional evaluation to developmental evaluation. The school will make breakthroughs in data application, focusing more on recording students' growth rather than making qualitative evaluations. The purpose is to form comprehensive and dynamic personalized digital archives, so that teachers can see their students in all aspects and provide more suitable education for them. At the same time, the archives can let parents have a deeper understanding of their children's strengths and potential, and help them to achieve personalized growth. The most important thing is to let students understand themselves, accept themselves and become better.
Case 6: Selective Education Achieves Outstanding Development
Ji Hongxu, Party Secretary and Principal of Jinyuan Senior High School, said that the school has implemented "selective education" for 20 years. The value of "selective education" lies in helping students to achieve outstanding development and live a wonderful life. The Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for Educational Reform and Development of Putuo District, Shanghai put forward the idea of "providing suitable education for every student to learn to grow up and live a splendid life". Suitability and selection are inseparable siblings, with selection being the premise of suitability and suitability being the result of selection. Selective education is a universal education model of suitable education for senior high schools. "Selection" and "suitability" are relatively complex theoretical issues, which cannot be adequately solved by experience alone. Data driving and technology empowerment are both required. The school has built a career planning guidance platform, supported by a series of technologies and methods such as data collection, data cleaning, tag mining, user modeling, portrait clustering and visualization, to draw students’ digital portraits of career cognition in which "ambition, interest and ability" match each other. Through the intelligent analysis and tracking of each student's growth trajectory, the platform can help and support data-empowered teaching, promote burden reduction and improve education and teaching efficiency, and turn "suitable education" from an ideal to reality.
Building a new ecosystem of smart education through the "1133" model
At the end of the live broadcasting, Vice District Governor Wang Yu said that Putuo is now gradually building an increasingly perfect digital governance system and mechanism to support the reform of education and teaching and establish a new ecological environment for the development of intelligent education. Putuo’s future digital transformation of education can be summarized as a "1133" model, namely focusing on 1 core (education), creating 1 platform (Putuo’s education digital base), stressing 3 key points (AI, data middle stage, and information literacy cultivation for teachers and students), and developing 3 modes (online teaching, comprehensive quality evaluation, and big data application) as the main new development mode.
Putuo District aspires to promote the high-level and high-quality development of "suitable education" in a more personalized and intelligent way through digital transformation, and strives to provide each student with personalized, independent, optional and lifelong high-quality education to learn to grow up and live a splendid life.
