My teacher is a robot!

South korea schools are lack of English teachers, so they used to hire foreign teachers, but korean people don't trust them because they accuse foreigners of being promiscuous (They even have to take and AIDS test if they want to enter the country) as a solution for this issue, Korea has invented robot teachers called Engkeys.
Engkeys are 3-foot tall egg-shaped devices developed by Korea Institute of Science of Technology (KIST) which display an occidental woman face on a screen. This robot is controlled  by English teachers in the Philippines, who can observe the class from another place and students will hear them and the robot will even  copy teachers' reaction, thanks to cameras watching his or her face. Besides reproducing what the teacher is saying, these machines have software programs that allow them play educational games and sing songs with the kids, as we can see in the video:

Engkeys have been well received by the children, who have declared that they feel more confident talking with a robot than with a present teacher and they feel more curious to learn. Obviously authorities have been pleased with this invention too, because hiring a long distance teacher is much cheaper than bring him/her to the country.
This is definitely a good invention, especially because there is still a human controlling it, but it is at the same time a tool to make discrimination even bigger.


What do you think about this? would you like to have a talking robot in the classroom instead of a real person?

Technology: a double-edged weapon

 Technology has become a very useful tool for education lately. It facilitates the practice of students, and it allows teachers to evaluate student’s skills inside the classroom as well as outside of it. Indeed, there are many important aspects that technology can promote in education; such as autonomous learning, problem-solving skills, balanced class development, etc. Nevertheless, technology in education can bring up a series of disadvantages for students and for education itself. For instance, technology emphasizes the social inequalities as not all the students have access to computers outside the educational institutions that is to say, schools or universities. This example leads us to another disadvantage which is the importance of previous knowledge on how to use technology; a student that doesn’t master the use of computers should learn to do it because the fact of noticing that gap could make him/her feel frustrated with the task, which might become useless. In my opinion, teachers should be careful with the use and over-use of technology, and they need to make sure that all or at least most of the students in the class have access to a computer. When this factor is taken into account, all the advantages can come about, thus successful learning may touch off.