Thoughts on the Masterplans;

I was a little surprised to read that the MOE Masterplans for ICT had been initiated since 1997. In retrospect, I do not remember having much technology-integrated lessons in my secondary and JC years. In fact, my JC tutors seemed to be Luddites who were bent on training us to take copious, handwritten notes. One of my tutors would even manually cut and paste excerpts from history books and then photostat these notes for us. They clearly did not give a hoot about ICT, but that could also have been because they were British.

Nevertheless, I remember that both my secondary school and JC had adequate computer facilities at the time. Students were often encouraged to come up with PowerPoint presentations and teachers frequently adopted this modus operandi for their lessons as well. E-Learning was only adopted when SARS struck our country and we were all forced to be quarantined for 2 weeks. At that time, the focus on self-directed learning was not apparent as the teachers were scrambling to come up with e-learning classes with the sudden advent of the epidemic.

In the short span of 9 years, however, the technological advancements that have been made have far surpassed the ICT Masterplans 1 & 2 of simply supplying the basic infrastructure in schools. As much as the MasterPlans sought to replicate the pervasiveness of technology in our classrooms, MP1 and 2 are no longer sufficient in meeting the technological standards today. However, MP3 shows a lot of promise in its vision to inculcate self-directed learners that involve both students and teachers. As students are constantly aware of the latest technological developments (perhaps even more so than teachers), it will require a collaborative effort on both parties to fully maximise the potential for engagement and learning that technology has. Hence, I believe there should be a platform where students can also share interesting websites and learning tools that the teachers can then employ, or even videos/internet resources that intrigue or inspire them.

As teachers, the onus also lies on us to demonstrate self-directed learning by keeping ourselves updated with the latest technological developments and resources. However, it is also important to remember that technology should complement the lesson and inspire the ideas that we would want students to think about. Fancy slides with little content still make for a poor lesson if the students are only engaged in the blinking words and moving pictures.