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.