Fruit of policy

The goal of basic IT literacy in Masterplan 1 indirectly impacted the students in Assumption English School through getting the teachers well-acquainted with computers at least two decades ago. These teachers are siblings, and some of them are parents who have taught this literacy to the students. Even if students do not own digital gadgets, they are at ease with ICT from seeing how their peers use their smartphones, mp3 players, and laptops for leisure, social networking, and schoolwork.

It is important to acknowledge that most school leaders, teachers, and students are very adept at using ICT because our consumption and recreational patterns are largely concerned with digital media. Movies can be watched in the theaters as well as at the comfort of one's own home with online streaming. Phones are considered current and up-to-date if they are smartphones wired with 3G and a data plan to access email or go online whenever desired. Online chat programs such as Whatsapp (online texting for smartphones) and Skype (video-conferencing program for computers with video cameras and limited smartphones) allow us to stay in touch with friends and business partners from across the world. It is not uncommon for my friends to even be interviewed for internships and jobs on Skype across the globe from Finland or Britain to Singapore. Accessibility to the Internet on-the-go matters increasingly to people in Singapore, as cafes, houses, bus stops, gardens, schools, and even security-tight military camps become more and more wired to provide wireless connection.

The fruit of Masterplan 2 is very evident in the school's reliance on their Sharing Folder, which is only accessible via the local network through specially programmed computers. Staff-wide announcements are made via listservs and teachers pool their resources together in the Sharing Folder. A practical spinoff from this is that resources or intra-staff submissions can be viewed on the computer without having to print it out. 

Even though Assumption English School might be lagging behind because they might have not been ready for higher levels of ICT use during Masterplan 2, they are definitely more than ready now. Adding computer use to the current variety of teaching methods can be helpful to the 62 students in the school with special needs, 20% of whom are dyslexic, while many others have Attention Deficit Hyperaction Disorder (ADHD). I find this area heavily lacking. The students and teachers (most of whom are relatively young and IT-literate) would love to use more ICT for their work -especially for the students who are comfortable with ICT like fish in water, but current ICT resources in the school are still limited. The students want to use a video camera for their news report video, but they find their own smartphones record videos of significantly better quality than those the school can offer.

 

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Masterplans is to intertwine our lives with people abroad.We are cosmopolitan in terms of the people in our country as well as our knowledge about countries. Our knowledge about countries incline towards privileged, developed ones such as the United States (from which we get much media influence), though there is considerable attention given to communities here and abroad less financially endowed. Perhaps the most prominent expression of this intertwining effect is our embracing of pop culture and American virtual products such as Facebook and Google.

We are comfortable with mobile technology that helps erode the classroom as a spatial barrier of learning. This has political implications too because the traditional sole authority of teacher can be potentially contested with the wealth of knowledge one can find on Wikipedia and Google. But much more encouragingly, learning can take place almost "anytime, anywhere" on the presumption that wireless connection is available. This can help disassociate boredom often linked with classroom-restrained theoretical learning to relevant and individual-oriented learning beyond academic subjects. In a way, wireless technology boosts Internet as a paradigm shift from learning within four walls to a new form of learning within environments, something reminiscent of apprenticeship learning in antiquity.

Masterplans

Infocomm technology (ICT) is an integral part of Singapore today, as well as the lives of many in developed parts of the world. Many Filipino youths who are poorer struggle with the keyboard and only have basic competency in internet browsing, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Powerpoint, while most of the Nepalis I met in Nepal have never used a computer - some of them not having even seen one before - in a country with two routine power cuts every day. Nor do these Nepalis have email addresses. In comparison, our leaders are visionaries who foresaw society moving towards ICT and 'soft' technology. 

Developing the three Masterplans for ICT in education is not crucial for learning, but gives students an added advantage of being IT-literate, an aspect much coveted and expected in many jobs in advanced cities. The benefits are beyond the concerns of employability and job prospects, however. It allows one to be aware of and contribute to other communities in the world, and share a wealth of experience and information across the globe. Google Images provided on-time satellite images of Japan after the recent tsunami attack, allowing all who have internet access to the see how catastrophic the impact was. Such external reports were timely when telecommunications was severely disrupted in the affected areas, and eventually led to many fundraisers in Singapore springing up to give Japan financial aid.

I was first introduced to computers in Primary 4 when my English teacher brought my class to the school's computer lab for a series of lessons on how to use the computer. I remember feeling very anxious as I often felt lost and could not catch up. There was an entire jargon that we had to figure our way through such as mouse, keyboard, monitor, shut down, desktop, window. In fact I didn't learn all of those jargons and have only picked up many of them in recent years (I just didn't know what to call them before that). After some lessons, we started exploring and played our favorite touch typing software game or Microsoft Paint. Eventually we even learned how to type Mandarin on the computer using hanyu pinyin. Those times at the computer lab made me happy to choose the Computer Club for my CCA. At the Computer Club every Saturday, we spent the mornings selecting beautiful images of grass fields and 'pasting' cute pictures of rabbits and cats into the field and printed our work after that to hang up at home or put in our homework files. I believe this was part of Masterplan 1 in introducing basic computer literacy to most of us.


Along with in-school computer use, a educational software vendor came to my primary school and sold CDs teaching us creative writing. Cereal boxes were also giving away free storytelling and games CDs. By pestering our parents, my siblings and I managed to get them to buy a Personal Computer for us. We spent a lot of time together sharing and/or fighting over the computer. Good times.


ICT in secondary school and junior college was mainly powerpoint presentations during lessons. It was only when I was in upper secondary in 2003 when my younger teachers started using powerpoint slides for teaching. It was mainly a lot of copying off the slides, something that my Primary 6 sister was also doing last year. I liked it when my Geography and Biology teachers showed us flash animations of diagrams and processes. It helped me visualize and motivated me to give Geography a second chance after two former teachers killed the possibilities of me enjoying the subject. All lectures in junior college were powerpoint presentations. By then, we could judge whether the slides were good or not based on how wordy the slides were, how substantial or value-added the teacher's explanation (or rattling off) of the bullet points on the slides were, and whether the aesthetics worked for us. My Economics lecturer created fascinating and complex animations to illustrate to us big concepts and help us see the big picture of the market economy. Once, he needed to create a new slide to further elucidate his point. We were plain dumbfounded and were won over hands down at the speed he created animations and shapes on the spot! We respected him because he knew how to get concepts across.  

Based on what little experience I have in schools, I expect that Masterplan 3 will push me as a beginning teacher to keep abreast of mainstream technology. Last year I became very fascinated with YouTube and wanted to make my own videos. I learned audio recording with help from a sound engineer and picked up videography myself. It was all an utterly fun experience and I would spend four to seven hours on end just recording audio files or editing videos strangely without a sense of time. Going on ESE made me realize how valuable these skills I've picked up are. I hope to continue making videos out of personal interest when I become a teacher. The added benefit is that I see it motivating me to keep my technological literacy current.

Because students can quickly check the validity of my claims, I foresee that as an added disincentive to be ill-versed or ill-prepared in the lesson topic. I might have a lot of knowledge in many areas of a subject, but it would take just one, two, or three oopsies in just one area I'm weak in for students' professional impression of me to be undermined. Having shared access to knowledge through technology however, is a good way of reminding me that I should remain open-minded and humble to being corrected, and also being willing to update my knowledge if/when it alters. In this kind of atmosphere, hopefully collaborative learning will take place.

Also, I think that Masterplan 3 will be a good opportunity never too late for me to learn to be more socially sensitive, appropriate, and self-controlled. It will be difficult to tell students to be "discerning and responsible" ICT users if I do not walk the talk. During the first few days of ESE, I felt strange that I was checking my phone in the open in school as and when I liked when the teachers and students didn't. It took me a while to get used to the practice of limiting the use of digital devices that the teachers and discipline committee have set for the students.

technology in the classroom

I am now at Assumption English School (just off Upper Bukit Timah) for my Enhanced School Experience. We're just into the third week now, which gives me some time to more fairly pen down my observations of how teachers use information and communication technology (ICT) in class than if I were to blog this earlier.

I chose class 3/3, one out of the three Secondary 3 Express classes in Assumption English. The ethnic mix in the class was much to my pleasant surprise. It was a microcosm of cosmopolitan Singapore with Singapore Chinese, Filipinos, Malays and a smattering of Vietnamese, Indonesians, and Singapore Indians. Interestingly, the (first- or second-generation) Filipinos acculturate very well to Singapore, and are especially pally with their Malay classmates, who look like them due to genetic stock and other sociocultural reasons that I'm currently unaware of.

As with the school's desire to give late bloomers a chance and to push teenagers beyond being defined by what academic stream they belong to, 3/3 first enrolled into the school with scores that would have landed them in the Normal (Academic) stream in other neighborhood schools. 3/3 is mostly male. There are no rowdy students, only lively, cheeky, cool boys who always show concern for my pregnant mentor. One boy in the cool crowd never ceases to offer her help every English lesson even before she enters the classroom. "'Cher, you need help?" was a ritual that the cool boys did at the start and end of every lesson. Other students are more reserved and generally very eager to complete their schoolwork well.

That day, my mentor reviewed answers for a timed Comprehension assignment 3/3 completed the Thursday before. The two passages were about controversy of human deaths and cruelty against fighting bulls in the famous bull runs and bull fights of the San Fermin festival held annually in Pamplona, Spain. The festival this year started the same day this review was done, which made the information even more relevant and current to the students. My mentor used a laptop, speakers, and projector to show the Comprehension answers, information about San Fermin, and a eyewitness video of a bull goring a man in a Pamplona bull run. She also used Powerpoint to give instructions to the class when the students did not heed her verbal instructions amidst their noisiness.

How my mentor used technology appears very commonplace to me, at least from my experience in university seminars and lectures which are heavily reliant on Powerpoint. She put the model answers on slides, copying the question and relevant excerpt from the comprehension passages, and then giving the answer. She highlights the keywords. I forget how much effort and time my school teachers took with overhead projectors and old-school writing boards.

The comprehension passages were excerpted from the BBC magazines. I enjoy reading BBC articles because they have wonderfully colored images and interesting layout as well as the words itself. Comprehension passages remake such fascinating knowledge by trapping it in numbered blocks of ink on white paper conventionally associated with academic assessment. Showing pictures and details about the festival, as well as the shocking video, compensated for the dulled sensationalism. In fact, I felt sick afterwards and wanted to vomit. The slides had just a plain white background but the information was very engaging and the topic shocking. The students were very appalled and kept asking the teacher questions along the way. This was a good way of teaching comprehension and paraphrase skills and spreading social awareness about suffering in other places.

My mentor laments that in project work requiring ICT, the students' desires to use ICT in their work outruns the school's prevailing infrastructure. A few students complained that the video cameras on loan by the school are very old (my professor has made similar complaint about a local university's equipment for loan). They would rather use their smartphones or DSLR cameras instead to record videos with quality similar to those Youtubers post online. This government-aided school does not seem to have as much resources as the academically stronger schools who are independent or on special schemes such as the Special Assistance Plan. The Media Resource Lab has barely enough computers for classes with 30 to 40 students to share about two students-to-one computer. The computers also run on software published over a decade ago (Windows XP). Also, the infrastructure sometimes fails to support the teacher, and the teacher's plans to use Internet for class ends up as writings on the whiteboard the 'conventional' way.

For the Secondary 1 Express students, they can buy a Lenovo laptop at the subsidized prize of about $900 for school work. They write their essays on it and do research in class, while sometimes going on to Facebook and other recreational websites as a breather from schoolwork. It captures their attention (except when the computer fails) and hopefully will facilitate their learning in the years to come. They are the first batch in the school to use laptops for much of their schoolwork.

AES is under-funded and could do with more resources as we head on already to Masterplan 3 for ICT use in schools. Older teachers generally prefer to stick to the whiteboard and overhead projector, while teachers who wish to use more ICT with students are strapped by the school's outdated infrastructure. Students seem very willing to use ICT since it is very much a part of their lives with TV, mobile phones, data plans, and online TV.