Describe which achievement(s) of the three Masterplans for ICT in education are evident in the school/classes that you are attached to for your ESE. You may want to refer to your blog post about your ESE.
In Christ Church Secondary, many of the goals from Masterplans 1, 2 and 3 have been achieved through the use of ICT. Online portals such as edumall and Northzone Exchange (NzX) are accessed often, allowing teachers to share resources with other schools, thus enhancing linkages between the schools.
The school does have the capacity and capability in using ICT for school improvement, via its suggestion scheme for teachers makes use of Google Docs, which encourages transparency and gives everyone the opportunity to be involved in innovative processes in school development, and education as a whole. It also makes it more accessible and thus more convenient for teachers to put forth their suggestions to the management, promoting professional growth. This not only enhances creative thinking and social responsibility for the teachers, it also results in an efficient feedback system for the SEC, which is a step towards promoting administrative and management excellence in the education system.
The use of ICT gives students, too, a chance to be more active learners when given research projects. For example, a History teacher, instead of spending a lot of classroom time detailing the lives of Singapore's forefathers, tasked students to do an investigation of Raffles and Farquhar, and present their findings in class. This also trains students in being more discerning, and thus, critical in thinking, for example, when choosing which information is relevant to their topics.
All the classrooms of Christ Church Secondary are fixed with a visualizer and projector, making it a snap for teachers to utilize ICT during their lessons, thus giving them the opportunity to engage the students more and lessen teacher-centredness in the classroom. This shows that the school does have a great infrastructure in place that supports widespread and effective use of ICT.
Apart from using ICT in instruction, teachers are also observed to assess students via ICT tools, for instance, quizzes are held online on the LMS website instead of the usual classroom tests. This encourages efficiency in learning and students are given immediate feedback once they are done, thus allowing them to correct themselves at that very moment instead of waiting for the teacher to be done marking. Teachers, too, get to save time when the computer marks all classes and analyses the results for them. In addition, in Christ Church, English teachers are making use of the Audacity program to train and assess students on their oral reading and picture description skills. Again, students here are able to self-evaluate and correct themselves accordingly when they listen to their own sound clips, thus enhancing active and self-directed learning to take place.
