Reflections on the ICT masterplan by MOE

Firstly I would like to say that I was puzzled when as a teacher I had to learn about ICT. Being of the Generation Y (or am I from X?), I grew up in an IT environment, my parents (who were also teachers) bought me educational software to facilitate my learning as a child and student. My classrooms in Anglican High were equip with some computers and we had regular lessons in the computer labs which everyone enjoyed compared to boring classroom lessons. What I did learn after reading up on the masterplans was that the implementation of the use of technology into classrooms was not just a haphazard introduction but a systematic, top-down intoduction. This is probably why I felt it was so natural to progress from school to school and level to level with the use of ICT in my education. Now I have come full circle, it is time I learn how to assist the next generation's use of ICT.

Having experienced first hand the use of ICT thoughtout my life in schools, I can safely say that the ICT masterplans are fruitfull. Compared to other countries who do not have a baseline ICT standard for all schools, the use of ICT in such places would be very one-offish. The benefits of having a homogeneous implementation of ICT needs no further explanation. Having a homogeneous masterplan for all schools also ensures that economic factors do not become much of an issue among households for the purpose of education as education in singapore is for all, regardless of family wealth. But I do need to comment that while the success of the pervasiveness of ICT in schools have been commendable, the homogeniety itself is a weakness. In my schooling days I loved certain areas of physics not inline with syllabus but would eventually kindle my interest in studying theoretical physics. Because my family was not poor, i was able to afford my own choice of software to use at home. However, the choices of ICT in schools would not be custom made or chosen by the pupil according to his interest but rather top-down decision for everyone. This in my opinion is the weakness of the three masterplans in that they are not user centric.

In my days as a student, i hated math classes, in fact i hated math altogether because of its non-visual nature. I needed to be eased into thinking in the abstract and the school Amath textbook rarely helped me achieve that. Luckily for me Mr Chan, my A math teacher had a whole lineup of ICT based lessons to help us visualize what it is we were learning. The most striking thing was the program graphamatica that allowed us to input a function and see how it becomes a sketched curve. The value of those lessons are priceless to me as we all know that theoretical physics is very largely mathematical in nature. I believe ICT had come a long way to groom this math-hating boy in secondary school to a physicist completely capable of understanding differentiable manifolds and doing push-up and pull-backs on abstract mappings in mathematical methods for physics III. From a boy who failed Amath at sec 3 to someone who appreciates math in physics, ICT had brought me a long way.