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.
