ICT - Impact of Masterplans

Q. Has any of the Masterplans impacted you as a student/teacher (if any)?

Masterplan 2 was in effect for the time I was in secondary school and junior college. The Masterplan’s emphasis on the pervasive usage of ICT to enhance educational processes was especially clearly manifested during my secondary school years. Apart from having a Computer Studies session in which we would learn how to use various software programmes ranging from Microsoft Excel to Adobe Photoshop, we also had an e-learning week every term where we would be made to complete online tasks from home. Besides, we were also encouraged to make use of online resources for research, and our assignments would often require us to make use of basic programmes like Microsoft Word or Powerpoint. The above has enabled me to become relatively proficient not only at gathering my own resources via the internet, but also in using IT tools at my disposal to consolidate and organise the knowledge I’ve acquired, which in turn allows me to be a more effective and independent learner. Furthermore, for some subjects, like mathematics, the usage of IT tools during lessons at times helped to stimulate my interest, whereas for other subjects (e.g. literature) the impact of IT in terms of stimulating my interest was relatively limited.

Q. How do you think the current Masterplan 3 may affect your role(s) as a beginning teacher?

Masterplan 3 stresses self-directed learning, and a mutual, as opposed to one-directional, learning relationship between teacher and student. In this way, as a beginning teacher, I would have to carefully evaluate my ideas of what playing the role of “teacher” entails, and how much autonomy I should grant my students over their own learning while at the same time providing them with the requisite guidance. In other words, I have to find the right balance between teaching and allowing students to teach themselves, a balance that could be potentially complicated by the differing learning paces of students, as well as the impetus to perform well in examinations. The focus on self-directed learning and ICT furthermore implies that I would spend relatively more time equipping students with the skills to access resources and databases independently rather than merely spoon-feeding them information - which hopefully means less work for me!

ICT - Importance of Masterplans

Q. Why do you think it is important for MOE to develop the 3 Masterplans for ICT in education?

The Masterplans essentially provide a framework within which ICT can be incorporated into the education system. As the world changes around us and technology increasingly becomes an integral part of our lives, it is important that the education system evolves to keep up with these changes in order to equip future generations with the skills and abilities necessary to remain competitive in such an environment. The integration of ICT into lessons can help greatly to enhance transmission of subject content to students as well: for instance, lessons can be made more interesting and stimulating, and thus more accessible to students. Being equipped with ICT skills would also mean that students would be a lot more independent academically, as they are able to tap into a wide variety of electronic/online resources by themselves; apart from the variety of resources, technology also enhances the ease and speed at which these resources can be accessed, which would, once again, enable students to facilitate their own learning. Given the importance and relevance of ICT to education and the goals of education – such as self-directed learning – it is only natural that there should be a guideline or framework in place to facilitate a fusion of the two.

With the Masterplans, the links between the incorporation of ICT into classrooms and learner outcomes/ outcomes for the school are clearly stated and reinforced: as Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said, “Our goal is ultimately not about the use of technology, but about changing the culture of the classroom and school to support and motivate thinking and independent learning among our pupils.” In other words, they provide a theoretical framework that enables the overarching educational goals to be kept in focus while implementing ICT in schools.

ICT - personal experience

Q. Reflect about how ICT was used by your former teachers. Highlight only one particular lesson conducted.

I studied at Raffles Girls School, and the particular lesson I remember is a geography lesson. The pupils in that class were about 15 years of age, and of varying levels of competency and interest: some were keen learners while others tended to be less engaged by the subject. On the whole, furthermore, it was a class that was often described by teachers to be bright but very talkative, and it could at times be difficult to get all of our attention at once.

My geography teacher at the time was relatively fond of using Microsoft Powerpoint to conduct her lessons. However, in that particular lesson, she incorporated other ICT elements into her Powerpoint presentation, such as video clips embedded into the slides and Flash animation clips. The videos and Flash clips were particularly helpful in allowing us to visualize physical processes in the natural world, as they translated the flat 2D images we had in our notes into a continuous stream of animation. This greatly facilitated our understanding of the subject content, and furthermore stimulated our interest in the lesson as the visual components were very effective in capturing our attention. It was also very useful in enabling us to remember keywords and key phrases in our textual notes.

Generally, most teachers in my school make use of ICT to make lessons more visually stimulating and interactive in nature. Apart from that, they also encourage the integration of ICT into our learning by setting ICT-related assignments for us to complete, or setting research tasks which require us to gather information online. Last but not least, there are also e-learning weeks during which, instead of going to school, we are made to complete tutorials and worksheets online.