Killing Two Birds with One Stone?-----Wechat Approach to School Life
Biographical Sketch
Ru Li is a doctoral student in Curriculum, Foundations and Reading program at Georgia Southern and also works as a graduate assistant to teach Mandarin Chinese in department of Foreign Languages.
Type of Presentation
Individual presentation
Brief Description of Presentation
Every coin has two sides, and there is no exception with WeChat usage. It is a super convenient, accessible and effective tool for almost everyone in China to pay bills, to consume be it in the big mall or on the street, to video chat with families and friends, to post like Facebook, to make appointment with doctors, and even more. Nowadays, it has been incorporated into school as well. Teachers, parents and children join the group to communicate student’s performance in school and at home. Nevertheless, they all simultaneously suffer from constant interruption of group chat and are publicly under scrutiny of entire community. How could the messaging App better serve in educational setting becomes a big concern for teachers because it changes school curriculum! although WeChat itself is not a monster.
Abstract of Proposal
Wechat, fundamentally a messaging app, has become excessively prevalent in almost every field throughout China since its launch by Tencent in 2011, which serves functions of PayPal, Uber, Facebook, Amazon and more. In a word, Wechat works as a combination of Skype, Facebook and PayPal. There is no exception at school setting that teachers take it as a means to submitting reports to principals and education board, assigning homework to students, communicating with parents about children’s performance at school and asking cooperation from parents to check students’ homework before going to school, assessing colleagues’ work, also, socializing with communities. Wechat has been incorporated into school and seemingly plays a perfect liaison between school and parents. However, issues related emerge too, for example, group chat puts everything happened at school under scrutiny of entire class, and sometimes parents, students, and teachers have to silence their phones to avoid the beeps heard while others file assignments and teacher sends reminders so that they can concentrate on what they are doing. Parents are also significantly concerned on remarkable time their children spend on checking cellphones, which not only influences students’ eyesight but also impacts on addiction to cellphone rather than books. Is Wechat really a stone that can kill two birds at the same time in school? Do we actually need cellphones in teaching context? How can digital devices better serve educational settings, if needed? I wonder.
Location
Session 6C (Habersham, Hilton Garden Inn)
Start Date
2-23-2019 1:55 PM
End Date
2-23-2019 3:25 PM
Recommended Citation
Li, Ru and Li, Ru, "Killing Two Birds with One Stone?-----Wechat Approach to School Life" (2019). International Critical Media Literacy Conference. 47.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/criticalmedialiteracy/2019/2019/47
Killing Two Birds with One Stone?-----Wechat Approach to School Life
Session 6C (Habersham, Hilton Garden Inn)
Wechat, fundamentally a messaging app, has become excessively prevalent in almost every field throughout China since its launch by Tencent in 2011, which serves functions of PayPal, Uber, Facebook, Amazon and more. In a word, Wechat works as a combination of Skype, Facebook and PayPal. There is no exception at school setting that teachers take it as a means to submitting reports to principals and education board, assigning homework to students, communicating with parents about children’s performance at school and asking cooperation from parents to check students’ homework before going to school, assessing colleagues’ work, also, socializing with communities. Wechat has been incorporated into school and seemingly plays a perfect liaison between school and parents. However, issues related emerge too, for example, group chat puts everything happened at school under scrutiny of entire class, and sometimes parents, students, and teachers have to silence their phones to avoid the beeps heard while others file assignments and teacher sends reminders so that they can concentrate on what they are doing. Parents are also significantly concerned on remarkable time their children spend on checking cellphones, which not only influences students’ eyesight but also impacts on addiction to cellphone rather than books. Is Wechat really a stone that can kill two birds at the same time in school? Do we actually need cellphones in teaching context? How can digital devices better serve educational settings, if needed? I wonder.
