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Education IT

Hong Kong primary school bolsters interactive learning

By Jianggan Li | 29 May 2009

Fanling Public School, a 500 pupil primary school in Hong Kong, was chosen as a Centre of Excellence for using ICT in education by the Territory’s Education Bureau in 2001.

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• INTERVIEW

“Back then, although we were already using the computers, the applications tended to be very teacher centric,” says Chong Wu Lam, a General Studies teacher who has been with the school for more than a decade. “There was very little interaction between teachers and students.”

With teachers like Chong who are passionate in IT, the school wanted students to take a more active role in learning, by making the teaching process more interactive.

It became the first Information Technology Learning Centre in Chinese and General Studies in 2004, in a government scheme aimed at developing interactive learning in schools.

Classrooms were re-arranged to foster more group discussions. ICT tools, including nine interactive whiteboards procured from Promethean, were introduced to help each group collaborate and accomplish their learning tasks.

“Electronic whiteboard is very helpful in fostering interactive teaching,” Chong says such tools not only allow teachers to put more content more flexibly but also give the students opportunity to contribute through a writing pad on their desks.

Students are also allowed to cast their vote on questions and issues through voting devices connected to the interactive whiteboard.

Chong adds that this is much more effective compared to teaching in a multimedia lab or with PowerPoint. “The interactions have helped students more readily grasp abstract concepts and then apply these principles to practical situations,” he says that since the adoption five years ago, the school has witnessed an ‘obvious improvement’ in the students’ motivation and concentration.

And combining the functions of PowerPoint, traditional blackboard, video player and so on, interactive whiteboard also allows teachers to prepare for their classes much more easily. In addition the connectivity with the internet allows them to access and share information with their peers more effectively.

The school has been collaborating with Hong Kong University and Hong Kong Institute of Education to develop methodologies to embed ICT in teaching.

“Universities are quite advanced in applying technologies in education, however it is hard to directly replicate that into primary schools,” says Chong. “That’s why we work together to customise these methodologies to the specific needs of our school.”

In the future, Chong hopes that students, empowered with technology, will be able to go out more and see the real world. “We hope better information access in the future can allow students to spend more time outside the school to learn from what they see in real life.”

Now PDAs, with all the necessary information pre-loaded, are used for students going on site trips. “They can access the web-based knowledge about the things they see during the trip, and relate the two to have a much better understanding,” Chong hopes better technologies could make it easier and more interactive.

For the classroom, Chong believes that more interaction and collaboration between students, aided with ICT will achieve much better results than assigning each student with a computer.

“Many schools in Asia are trying to equip every student with a computer in the classroom,” he says. “I don’t think it is necessary or even productive.”

“IT equipments are ultimately tools,” he adds. “Whether they are effective or not depends on how you apply them to your teaching activities.”

Chong is also worried about the over-reliance on communications through virtual channels. “Good at e-chats doesn’t mean good at interacting with people,” he says. “We can’t afford to let physical communications diminish.”