Pre-session Blog Entry 3

From my Enhanced School Experience at Pioneer Junior College (PJC), several achievements of the three MOE-developed Masterplans for ICT in education are evident. The first and probably the most important one is the widespread acceptance by teachers of ICT as a pedagogical tool in the classroom and also their comfort in using ICT tools and resources to support classroom teaching. PJC teachers generally perceive the use of ICT tools as an indispensable component of their classroom teaching and are in fact excited about the various possibilities that the arise from integrating ICT in education. This can be seen in the effort by many PJC teachers to make use of non-traditional presentation formats (e.g. prezi) together with easily digestible resources like short video clips to enhance students’ interest in the lessons.

The second achievement is the highly impressive physical and ICT infrastructure for ICT-based teaching and learning in PJC, which is crucial in ensuring the successful implementation of the three Masterplans. This could be seen in the smooth and easy access by teachers to MOE’s Intranet and the Internet, which facilitates teachers’ use of Internet resources (e.g. online videos) to conduct their lessons. In addition, teachers can easily make use of the well-equipped computer labs as alternative venues for their classroom teaching as part of their effort to inject some creativity into their lessons. The key point is that the school is able to provide the necessary technological infrastructure for the teachers to integrate the use of ICT tools into education, which in itself showcases the concrete success of the first two Masterplans.

Finally, the successful implementation of the Masterplans can be seen in the increasing use of ICT by students as well. Although the traditional teacher-student consultation sessions continue to be the norm at PJC, students are increasingly willing to seek answers to their queries via emails and online discussion forums. Since teachers may not always have the time to meet the students to address academic queries, such ICT tools allow the teachers to flexibly and effectively handle these queries and perhaps even help more students than what is possible under the conventional consultation system. As such, meeting the targets of Masterplan 3 would hopefully further encourage and entrench the use of ICT in facilitating greater communication between teachers and students.

Pre-session Blog Entry 2

The three MOE-developed Masterplans for ICT in education clearly reflect Singapore’s recognition of the importance of being at the forefront of the latest technological trend even in the educational sector. This is particularly so as the advance in ICT has impacted deeply on our everyday lives in a way that most people would probably not have expected less than twenty years ago. Nowadays Singaporeans are generally seen as IT-savvy and the fact that the use of ICT tools has been seamlessly integrated into the teaching process certainly highlights the far-sightedness of MOE’s Masterplans way back in 1997.    

The three Masterplans for ICT in education are especially important because the traditional classroom teaching would probably not be able to avoid the winds of change brought by technological progress in a country as IT-savvy as Singapore. I believe that with education being primarily a people-centred enterprise with teacher-student interactions as one of the key components, it is necessary for both teachers and students to be able to communicate in the same technological lingo. In that sense, the Masterplans’ consistent emphasis on training and preparing teachers for the use of ICT in education is a critical step in at least minimising the technological gap that is likely to emerge between teachers and students in this ever-changing world.    

Based on my enhanced school experience at Pioneer Junior College, the current Masterplan 3 would mean that as a beginning teacher, I would need to be prepared for a more innovative and ICT-friendly teaching environment in the near future. For instance, one of the aims of the Masterplan is that of “piloting 1-notebook-to-1-pupil ratio in more schools”, which would probably impact on how I would conduct future lecture and tutorial classes. The Masterplan may also affect me directly in terms of my professional development, especially if I am given the opportunity to be trained as an “ICT specialist teacher.” Hence it is quite clear to me that Masterplan 3 has the potential to offer an exciting array of possibilities/options that would necessitate a revision of my previous assumptions about the teaching profession and pedagogical methods. The challenge for me is to keep up with the evolving environment to ensure my relevance as well as maximise my effectiveness as a teacher. 

Pre-session Blog Entry 1 (Enhanced School Experience)

During the JC1 history lecture that I observed at Pioneer Junior College (PJC), ICT was used by the teacher to facilitate the teaching process and also enhance the students’ learning experience. In choosing a prezi presentation over the more commonly used Microsoft powerpoint slides, the teacher was clearly doing her best to capture the students’ attention using prezi’s flash presentation. The students certainly responded positively to the teacher’s use of prezi and demonstrated more interest as compared to previous lessons in which Microsoft powerpoint presentations were used.

The use of short historical video clips in the lesson was another noteworthy observation. While the insertion of pictures in the prezi presentation helped made the lesson more interesting, it was the video clips which really eased the students into the learning process. Watching and hearing the various historical events and actors in action was a far more effective way for the students to understand their lecture notes instead of the teacher explaining without the assistance of such visual aids.

In this respect, the visualiser was also a key ICT tool in that it enabled the teacher to ascertain that the whole class was “on the same page” literally (referring to their lecture notes), thereby controlling the lesson pace. For instance, the teacher could accurately and instantaneously pinpoint the specific sentences/terms to be highlighted by the students in the lecture notes using the visualiser.     

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On the use of ICT for teaching and learning in Pioneer Junior College, the teachers on the whole appreciate its usefulness and make a conscious effort to employ ICT tools in their lessons. The most common reason for their ready acceptance of ICT is their recognition that students nowadays are IT-savvy, which probably makes the use of ICT in school an inevitable trend. Unless they are able to demonstrate a similar familiarity with ICT, such a technological disconnect may hamper the teachers’ interactions with the students.

In addition, ICT allows the teachers more flexibility and creativity in planning their lecture and tutorial lessons. Admittedly the teachers have to spend more time and effort to create prezi presentations and search for relevant and easily digestible video clips, to cite a few examples, which may be one drawback in contrast to the traditional classroom teaching. Even so, the teachers generally acknowledge that the successful integration of the use of ICT into their lessons has done much to enrich the learning environment for both teachers and students in the classroom.      

Finally, the teachers find a great degree of convenience in using such ICT tools. This is particularly the case for more senior teachers who still recall the days when the use of ICT was associated with negative words like “troublesome” and “technical problems” (e.g. the old cumbersome video cassette tapes). The subsequent technological achievements achieved since then mean that the opposite is true today, constituting an important “pull” factor for the use of ICT for teaching purposes.