Beacon Primary School is a future school piloted for the purpose of R&D for ICT. The school serves as a platform for other schools to adopt best practices practiced within. As such, the school has ready infrastructures to conduct lessons using ICT easily.
The school practices 1-1 computing from Primary 2 onwards. In each class, there were laptops provided for each child. In Primary 1, the ratio of the laptops to the children is 1:2. As such, teachers were able to give class works using the laptops and children would be able to response immediately. Many times, alternative assessments were also conducted via the E-portal.
The school also disseminate home works via the portal and E-learning takes place frequently in Beacon. The children would have to download slides taught in class as revisions and attempt review questions thereafter. During the June holidays, many interesting educational sites and slides were uploaded for the children to access during their free time. In order to track if the children indeed access the sites during the school holidays, the portal captured all the information instantly. As such, we knew exactly who were the ones who did not attempt the revisions and do their home works online. This platform allows the children to take responsibility of their own learning and become self-directed learners.
Blogging is also another popular web tool used by the school. Accounts were created for the children in each class and they were encouraged to blog frequently to express themselves and to do reflection on a regular basis. Thus far, the school has been very successful in implementing blogging because children want to be heard and they feel proud when their posts have been published. They not only like others to comment of their posts but they are very active in commenting about what the teachers and classmates have written. This not only allows the class to understand more about each other, it allows quieter ones to voice out their opinions online too. Many times, the children blogged about topics or events which were not discussed in the classroom and this creates new awareness and knowledge for others.
ICT lessons are not limited to laptops, computers nor IWB boards only. During excursions, the school would provide cameras for the children to share and capture pictures that were useful for their projects. Children were trained since Primary 1 on the usage and functions of cameras.
Teachers in Beacon are expected to take on reseach as part of their professional development. They constantly explore new web tools to share among each other.
I am fortunate to be attached to Beacon Primary School for my contract teaching. As this is not a mainstream school, I'm able to have many first hand experiences on how ICT can enhance learning and understand the future directions of education. With this, I'm sure I will be able to bring forth some ideas to the next school that I will be attached to in time to come
As a beginning teacher, I see many possibilities in harnessing the use of ICT. For example, I would like to explore the usage of blogs. I would use blog as a for of communications to parents. Parents these days are more educated and most would take on an active role in their child's education journey. Thus, it is important to keep them informed about what have been taught and the activities that were conducted through the use of blogging. Besides, I believed that children should learn how to express and communicate their feelings and thoughts so I would want them to start doing so by blogging. In this way, parents and teachers will be able to understand what the child is going through especially if the child is facing difficult issues. Blogging will help the child to cultivate the love for wriiting and to express themselves.
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