What does a future school look like?

Sunday, 5 February 2012

RESOURCE CENTRE

Tax and Revenue Management: A government’s lifeblood

IT has provided the opportunities for governments to remodel the entire process of tax collection over the last decade. It is, however, a continuously evolving process and governments the world over need to constantly upgrade their tax systems to optimise their revenue workflows.

Unlocking Public Value

A recent SAP study confirmed that those organisations which adopt best practices in the areas of scope and adoption, process standardisation, technology and customer governance, do perform better, and do so as their best practice maturity increases.

Governments and Socialising

The advent of social media has seen governments hopping onto the bandwagon in a bid to further engage citizens.

Education IT

By Kelly Ng | 13 July 2010

Hwa Chong Institute (HCI) was the first independent school in Singapore selected by the Ministry of Education to be a Future School in 2008. Deputy Principal Chung Wen Chee revealed how the school translated its commitment to leverage educational technology into rewarding lessons in the classroom.

Photos

View photos

Related Categories

From this Section

INTERVIEW

The ‘Future School’ accolade exerted pressure on the school leadership to produce results, according to Chung. In order to move forward, it was important to first get the community – of teachers, parents, and approximately 4000 students – on board.

“We took the bottom up and ‘slow release’ approach,” Chung said. Bottom up meant that teachers were given the autonomy to choose any IT tool and integrate it into the class, based on their own confidence level. “Many schools will not be comfortable with this method because it is difficult to manage. You do not know which direction you are going.”

The ‘slow release’ approach gave teachers control over the rate of transformation. “You may have a suite of educational applications, but instead of giving your teachers everything, you only provide the applications which they request for. That way, faculty staff who are doing better get more and those who are slower can adapt at a comfortable pace,” he explained.

An integrated learning portal jointly developed with Singapore Technologies – called the Hwa Chung Nexus – will be launched in 2011. It will be a collection of web 2.0 applications, including personal learning portals for students, electronic portfolio, learning management system, thinking tools, games and a video sharing network called ‘Hwa Chong Tube’. HCI expects the portal to make a significant impact to how teaching and learning is conducted.

In the meantime, Chung understood the need to prepare the teachers. “The pedagogy of the past will always remain a baggage,” he observed. “In order to push the faculty to new thinking, the school needs to provide platforms for practice.”

During the H1N1 pandemic last year, HCI saw the opportunity to run a mass home-based learning exercise. For the first five days of the third term, classes were conducted online. Within a short span of time, the teachers created over 130 educational web sites on a range of platforms, such as Wiki, Google Doc, Ning, Moodle, Edublog, etc.

“Using a new platform does not mean the teachers immediately adopted new pedagogies. For example, a math teacher simply transported his classroom lessons directly into videos. There was no shift in paradigm, but he was leveraging the platform to improve clarity and instruction,” Chung commented.

The students and teachers experienced real benefits of ICT-integrated education. Students were able to learn at their own pace, giving them more time and space to explore other topics or revisit topics to improve understanding. Teachers enjoyed the high participation rate in online discussion forums. “The challenge which followed was ending the discussion. In a physical classroom, the bell rings and the lesson stops. But how do you stop an online conversation?” he said.