The world is changing in large part due to the technological advances in recent years. With everything interconnected through the internet, AR and VR technologies creating immersive AV experiences, and now generative AI breakthroughs, it seems that students nowadays have a lot on their plates. With adults scrambling to learn new skill sets amidst these large-scale transformations, the question that plagues the minds of countless teachers all over the world is: how can educators give future generations the skills required to thrive in an ever-changing future world?

We had the honor of interviewing Superintendent Haishuo Lee of Wagor International School, a leader in Taiwanese education from K-12 located in Taichung central Taiwan. He shares his thoughts on the challenges of pushing education technology and the core competencies in the era of generative AI.

Q: How does Wagor International School utilize technology in schools?

I’d like to start by saying Wagor International School is a rather special school, as it holds the title of the very first Apple Distinguished School in Taiwan. Wagor has been purchasing iPads for every single student from middle to high school for around a decade, ensuring every student always has a powerful learning tool. We give the students the iPad, meaning that the iPads are now the students’ property.

Now, you must be wondering why we are so generous with giving out iPads. There are two main reasons. Firstly, students pay close attention to taking good care of their iPads, rather than viewing them as school property that they don’t particularly care for. Second, when a student owns an iPad, they spend more time getting acquainted with the device, which nurtures their learning habits. If students only spend a bit of time during certain classes using iPads, then they are less familiar with the device and are less capable of using the iPad as an incredible learning tool.

When teaching younger students in kindergarten to elementary school, we don’t give out iPads like we do for middle and high school students due to parental concern over digital screen time. Still, we make sure that students have access to iPads in class and we do so by utilizing charging carts from AVer, which we believe to be the most reliable brand for this product. At Wagor, we want to streamline class preparation for educators, minimizing the amount of time spent on repetitive, boring tasks. Since our curriculum stresses digital and self-learning, it would be a disaster if a teacher prepared a great class only to find that the digital devices that the curriculum is built on were not charged. From experience with a variety of charging carts, we now choose to rely on AVer charging carts all over our campus to ease this part of class preparation for teachers.

Aside from digital hardware, our curriculum emphasizes maker education, supported by classrooms with equipment that teach maker skills. Whatever maker learning tools come to mind, I’m pretty confident that we have most of them. Just to name a few, we have coding toys, 3D printers (we actually have four different types), 4-axis and 6-axis drones, and many more. I’d say we have a pretty diverse set of maker learning tools in our school.

Last but not least, Wagor places a lot of emphasis on the application of technology. We want our students to learn technological skills and gain the ability to apply them in the real world. For example, we have entered the KidWind Challenge, a prominent renewable energy contest. Since the first year in Taiwan, our elementary school students have been winners in the contest and even placed first out of all the elementary schools in central Taiwan just in October. We truly want students to learn and apply what they learn in class and use it in the real world.

Q: What are the pain points in the classroom that Wagor as an international school experiences?

One of the biggest challenges for us is that technology is hard to push into classrooms: you simply cannot expect all teachers to have the same skills in evolving technologies. Therefore, we end up relying on reliable, intuitive technology and teamwork to make things happen.

If technology malfunctions even 10 percent of the time, teachers will see technology as unreliable and will never use it again. This is why charging carts are so important for education with technology, they make the charging process simple and reliable.

Another aspect that affects the reliability of technology is the internet infrastructure of schools. As long as technology requires an internet connection, the speed and bandwidth of the internet are vital to the functionality of all technology that relies on the internet. Oftentimes when schools start using internet-based technology, they start with small classes or even with just a few students. After the initial period of trial testing, they decide that the technology is good to go, but the initial period only requires enough internet bandwidth to accommodate a few devices. When multiple classes of students need the internet connection simultaneously, the original internet connection will for sure be choppy and difficult to have a class with. These are the things that any school and teacher has to consider when trying to digitize the classroom.

The next issue is the intuitiveness of the technology we’re trying to push. If technology is too fancy or difficult to use, many teachers can’t learn it well. Even at Wagor, which I’d say is a technologically advanced school in Taiwan, only 6% of teachers are in a Line group chat to learn about AI trends. This shows that there is still a long way to go when it comes to implementing new technologies in our education system. Our current strategy is finding teachers who are early adopters, so they can show by example how technology can be utilized to simplify teachers’ workloads and achieve better learning outcomes for students. When the more hesitant teachers see the results of adapting to new technologies, they are much more willing to try the technologies because there are people who can share how they did it.