Digital Opportunity Trust

Entries For: June 2009

2009-06-19

Peel the Banana Before Eating It

It is common sense that we eat bananas after peeling the bananas. But once, there was a lazy monkey who always ate bananas with the peel. He had kept this habit for many years. He was too lazy to peel bananas after picking them off the tree. Though it did not taste good, those bananas could feed his stomach up. Then many years later, he happened to have a sight of people. They first peel the bananas and then eat them. After that, human beings throw the peel away. The monkey mimicked human beings and found out that bananas tastes sweet after being peeled. 


 The fable implies that we should try new things and maybe sometimes rack our brains. It is never enough to only say, “no, this won't work.” without trying different ways. Having tried, sometimes many times, then can we realize that bananas without peel taste much better.  


 One of my biology teachers used to be fond of using ready-made teaching materials to make courseware and thus the courseware was dull and not attractive. My team members and I encouraged him to look at other teachers’ course ware and he was quite surprised how affluent the contents are. Then, he noticed his colleagues surfing the internet for teaching materials. After that, he decided to try and asked us to help with his personal learning project. We fixed several mal-performing skills he used to have and added search engines on his computer. Before long, he started searching for teaching materials such as pictures, texts, videos, etc. He also compared course wares written by teachers from other schools and uploaded on the internet as well as by his colleagues with the ones written by him. Gradually, his courseware contents expanded and became more attractive and lively. Since then, he was very enthusiastic about learning computer skills and started asking our team all kinds of computer questions. 

Sometimes we have to show teachers the correct ways to search for information before they realize how convenient internet really can be.

 

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