1. What are the main goals of each Masterplan for ICT in education and why do you think it is important for MOE to develop them?

Master Plan 1: Building the foundation, launched in 1997. The master plan laid the foundation for the building of an ICT living society, ready to function in the globalized future.

Goals: Ministry aims to equip ICT infrastructures in every school and multimedia resources were specially developed and procured for teaching and learning as well. Teachers were trained to harness the educational value of ICT and accepted ICT as a pedagogical tool.

Master plan 1 is important as it would allow both students and teachers to gain richer perspectives through communicating and collaborating with their counterparts with other organization from around the world.

Secondly, ICT-based learning strategies train students to think in a more flexible way so that they will be able to work well with others and exercise sound value-based judgment.

Furthermore, assessment and curriculum would explore more possibilities through the launch of new teaching and learning strategies. Schools have their choices of choosing their own ICT resources as well as design their own preferred campus to maximum ICT integration.

Lastly, ICT promotes efficiency in school administration and communication which able educational management to be even more effective.

Mater Plan 2: Change and Innovation, launch in 2002. It was focused on how ICT could be pervasively and effectively used to bring about engage learning.

Quote from speech by Tharman Shanmugaratnam “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. The culture of Singapore classroom is no longer static. Teachers are changing and learning. IT will be benefit in schools if it helps to keep this process of change going.

This master plan allows teachers to engage their students more during teaching as the usage of IT resources enable teachers to show extra information which is beyond textbook.

It also changed the traditional way of teaching, which was more teachers-centered. With the introduction of ICT, e-learnings are easily accessed. Students are in charge of their own learning during e-learning sessions and thus they will be learnt to be responsible for their own learning and also to lest them realize that learning can be done in anywhere, whether to be in school or at home. As such, students attain knowledge out of their own desire rather than spoon-feeding than from their teachers.

Students will be able to view their assignment comments from their teachers through the net and students can learn from their own mistakes thus producing better results.

In this Master Plan, there are four key priorities to harness ICT for teaching and learning; Capacity building, Experimentation, ICT for all and Curriculum and Assessment.

In Capacity building, the focus is on building the school’s ability and readiness to take the full ownership of the ICT plans. Moe supports school leaders and teachers as they planned and developed a sustainable module and professional development.

With different school moving forward at different pace, MOE has put in place the baseline standards. These standards ensure all pupils have the basic ICT competencies. The baseline ICT standards stress the importance of meaningful ICT-enabled learning experiences and also focus on teachers’ ICT integration practices, IT HODs’ ICT planning practices, and for ICT infrastructure requirements and digital resources, to ensure that all schools achieve a baseline level of ICT use.

Strengthen the integration of ICT in the curriculum and assessment by focusing on areas of strategic importance and needs and developing partnership models to resource the schools.

Master plan 3: This master plan continues the vision of the first and second master plans to enrich and transform the learning environments of our students and equip them with the critical competencies and dispositions to succeed in a knowledge economy.

Outcome goal: Students developed competencies for self-directed and collaborative learning through the effective of ICT as well as becoming discerning and responsible ICT users.

Enabler Goal: School leaders provide direction and create conditions to harness ICT for learning and teaching.

Teachers have capacity to plan and deliver ICT-enriched learning experience for students to become self-directed and collaborative learners, as well as nurture students to become discerning and responsible ICT users.

ICT infrastructures support learning anywhere, anywhere.

Self-Directed Learning is about independent learning. Through such learning scheme, student will be trained to set their own learning goals as well as identify learning tasks to achieve the goals. Besides setting goals, students are also trained to explore alternatives and make sound decisions. They are required to articulate their own questions and generate their own inquire. Plan and manage workload and time effectively and efficiently. Reflect on their learning and use feedback to improve their schoolwork. They are also encouraged to learn beyond their curriculum. Students are trained to organize their own learning process through this learning scheme using ICT; they also become self-motivated learners as they have to achieve their goal within the set time frame.

Group works are required in collaborative learning. In group works, negotiations are to be made to set the common goals. This learning scheme trains students co-operate with each other during group works. It also teaches student that in group work, no one-man show; everyone has to contribute. Student must always remember to listen to other group members’ opinions and discuss in the group to see whether they are doable.

Source: The ICT connection.

2. Has any of the Masterplans impacted you as a student? Share your experience on how ICT had been used in the classes you attended as a student (if applicable).

As a student back at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, masterplans had impacted me in various ways. For performance history module, we were required to submit our assignments through ilearn (a platform where lecturers communicate with students with regards to lesson contents, assignments, announcements and etc.). I found ilearn was very useful as it saved me a lot of time in terms of submitting assignments as I need not have to go down to the office to submit them personally. Lecturers give feedbacks for our assignment drafts through ilearn as well, thus we would get the comments as fast as the lecturers had made them thus we could amend the assignments immediately so that we would score better grades.

Our lecturers conducted debate sessions on ilearn too. Students debated on a given topic during the lesson. Unlike the traditional debate where debtors argue virtuously verbally, students would only need to type in their own opinions online which could be seen by the whole class and from then, the rest of the students would join in and discuss/argue at the same time. I think this activity was brilliant because it overturned the traditional way of debating as it allowed as many people to join in the debate at the same time online. More people were engaged in the debate and it encouraged all students to participate the debate.

We were also allowed to send in enquires and doubts to our lecturer through ilearn, they would always reply us as fast as they could. Lecturers would also post lesson contents on ilearn for students to revise. Ilearn is a good ICT tool in assisting teaching as it is very convenient and time-saving.

3. How do you think the Masterplan 3 for ICT in Education may affect your role(s) as a beginning teacher?

This module will equip me with necessary IT skills which I will be needed as a beginning teacher in the future. The ministry has drew plans to promote self-directed learning and collaborative learning schemes via ICT in schools. Thus, it is our duties to carry on the mission around the campus. Self-directed learning scheme trains students to be independent learners and they can be self-taught via internet, for instance, through e-learning sessions. They can also do their learning-progress planning, revision and etc via the net. However, all these plannings and learning are ICT-based. Thus it is essential for us to attain sufficient ICT skills so that we can promote self-directed learning scheme and in the meanwhile monitoring the students too. It is our duty to promote cyber wellness to students as well, teaching them on how to use the internet safely.