The three MOE ICT master plans has developed and adapted itself to the changing, globalised world over the past decade. From mere systemic use of IT, MOE sought to develop the use of ICT to fully maximize its potential in the education scene. The three Moe master plan ultimately seeks to empower students and enable independent learning that are in-depth and personalized. It aims to promote a culture of life-long learning, and learning that can take place anytime, anywhere.
I’m impressed with the implementation of the ICT master plan in that it was not a half-hearted attempt. MOE went all the way to fulfill their objectives for ICT with training programme not only for the students, or selected teacher trainers in an institution but for the entire school. Each teacher are to receive at least 30 hours of training and targets were set for all schools to have ICT-enabled lessons for up to 30% of curriculum time. The ICT budget was also set in place in their bid to fully back their ICT plans. This commits the MOE to realise the goals of the ICT, because it not only equips the school, but also creates a culture that will be more accepting with the concept of ICT learning and teaching. It lessen inertia to the use of ICT for the older generation of teaching staffs, and in time to come, the future generations will find the use of ICT a breeze.
With the future generation of more tech-savvy students, they will find it exceptionally rewarding and engaging if they could utilise their IT skills in learning. ICT will most definitely ensure a more holistic development of the students by giving them the chance in taking ownership of their learning. Promotion of independent learning will rectify the culture of restrictive classroom lessons, and spoon-feeding strategy that have long plague the education system. With the full participation in ICT, students will find that they could develop their intellectual as well as asethetic abilities.
I think you've brought up a very pertinent point about how the encouragement of self-directed learning will rectify the problem of a spoon-feeding style of pedagogy that has plagued our education system. Yet, I doubt that the spoon-feeding will ever really go away! I guess that will be one of the biggest challenges we will face as beginning teachers-- trying to reconciliate between ensuring that our students have a clear grasp of the content necessary to answer examination questions, and encouraging a wide-range learning that is paradoxically impossible to constraint within examination boundaries.
ReplyDeleteHmm as much as I like to complain about the system as well as point out problems and flaws in the masterplan, I have to admit that we could possibly be in the process of transition and thus the judging of ICT effectiveness and success cannot be done yet. You did bring up a good point though and that is if we view this generation and time as the starting point of ICT in schools then we're still in the process of a transition and hence cannot be in a position to judge. Instead we should revel in this role as experiment test subjects to feedback and tweak the system so that when it finally becomes a reality (which I predict to be at least 20 years time) we would be in a situation that is best for students and teachers
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