SINGAPORE: Beacon Primary, one of two primary schools under the Education Ministry’s FutureSchools project, is proving to be a hit with parents at the Primary One registration exercise this year.

The school has been specially chosen to focus on innovative teaching approaches that use information and communications technology tools to improve learning.

Being a brand new school, the bulk of applicants have come under Phase 2C onwards.

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Teacher Readiness To Use And Teach Using ICT

In SMJK Dindings, the necessary ICT infrastructures, the training, support, easy access policy and encouragement are actively promoted. Will the communities in school utilize the ICT tools to enhance the administrative, teaching and learning process? The school has established policies of encouraging the communities to utilize ICT tools to replace time consuming and repetitive manual tasks. Examination, students and library managements have gone digital. Students are able to check their examination results, view their merit and demerit records, and review the library borrowing history online in school or at home; certainly the ICT tools have become the prime enabling factor in these transformations. Students and teachers have used the ICT tools to their advantage and will continue to use it. Mr. Gerry Smith of River Oaks Public School said that if we can restructure the curriculum properly we would not have to worry about how the technology fits. Technology should become almost transparent in the learning process for students and teachers. The ICT tools will become pervasive tools and the prime enabler.

ICT Applications In SMJK Dindings

With the necessary ICT infrastructure, support, training, access and monitoring established, the ICT tools in SMJK Dindings are used to provide various services to the administrators, teachers and students. One of the notable applications is the online web-based School Management System (SMS). The other is the Squidguard, an Internet filtering system designed to prevent access to undesirable web sites.

School Management System (SMS)

School Management System (Web-based SMS) is an online information system for students, parents, teachers and administrative staff to conduct and process day-to-day business. It supports an information environment for all levels of school and staff to do reporting, data extraction, and information analysis. The School Management System (SMS) is an easy-to-use, integrated web application implemented in school to reduce time spent on administrative tasks so that school can concentrate on raising students’ achievements. The School Management System (SMS) is designed to integrate the four elements of an educational system – Management, Teachers, Students and Parents. It starts from a basic module with student and teacher portfolio to a complex open communication channel which facilitates synchronisation between the four elements with information and helps school to be efficient and effective. The School Management System (SMS) program is written in PHP, Java Applets and Open Sources database, PostgresSQL, running on Linux Operating System, accessing via web browsers.

Some of the components of School Management System (SMS) are:

· Real-Time Attendance with RFID

· Students Discipline

· Examination Management

· Library Management

· Co-curriculum Activity

Real-Time Attendance With Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)

The RFID card or tag is an identification card for access control, time and attendance that incorporates 13.56 MHz contactless radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The school working with a private software company implemented the passive RFID cards and readers, and integrated the technology with the school’s existing web-based School Management System (SMS) to create a seamless integrated information system. As students approach the classroom entrance, they present a RFID tag, printed with their name and photo, to the reader attached to the classroom entrance. This information is then forwarded to the school’s database for attendance records and is accessible in real-time to the staff with access to computers. The student attendance information can be tracked easily at any point of time by teachers, parents, principal or students themselves by logging on to the system.

Students Discipline

SMJK Dindings deployed web-based online Merit and Demerit System accessible to school administrators, teachers, parents and students themselves. An important feature of the online system is transparency, accountability and a sense of fair play in every punishment or reward meted out. Teachers and students can formally report any demerit or merit events to the disciplinary board, after investigation, marks for merit and demerit are awarded and students can view it online. Students with demerit exceeding 20 points, their names will be forwarded online to counselors to attend counseling sessions and appropriate disciplinary actions follow suit.

squidGuard

It is a combined filter, redirector and access controller plug-in for Squid. It is free, very flexible, extremely fast, easily installed and portable. In SMJK Dindings, squidGuard is used to filter Internet access based on the following parameters.

• Block access to some listed or blacklisted web servers and/or URLs
• Block access to URLs matching a list of regular expressions or word.
• Enforce the use of domain names/prohibit the use of IP address in URLs.
• Redirect blocked URLs to an “intelligent” CGI based info page.
• Have different access rules based on time of day, day of the week, date and different user groups.

Conclusion

To integrate ICT into school curriculum and to achieve the goal of information anytime and anywhere is only possible if there is a determined effort by the part of the school administration to achieve it. ICT can only become a pervasive tool in an effective learning process if the tool itself is transparent, widely available and accessible. If we are still struggling with the idea how to force the ICT to fit into school curriculum, it will become an obstacle rather than an enabler in the learning process. Judging from the various online applications running on the robust ICT infrastructure in SMJK Dindings and the culture of using ICT in the daily learning process is a testimony to the successful integration of ICT into school curriculum.

Content Creation & Electronic Learning Community

Improving teachers’ access to high-quality educational content and the effective deployment of these resources in learning and teaching is necessary if ICT is to have a positive impact on curriculum performance.

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Appedix 1

It is of little use if the ICT facilities are restricted most of the time. SMJK Dindings has clear and simple ICT access-rules. Students are encouraged and permitted to use ICT facilities in computer labs, staffroom, library and classrooms without adult supervision. Simple but enforceable rules on the ICT usage are prominently displayed on the entrances to ICT facilities. Students and teachers have easy access to ICT facilities even on weekends or when the school is not in session, unlimited access to Internet surfing, printing facilities, CD burning, and using digital camera. Students are entrusted to manage, maintain and lock up the ICT facilities after use. It is the goal of SMJK Dindings to equip every classroom with five units of multimedia network-ready PC. Every room in the school is wired with UTP Cat.5 cable for network connection.

ICT Training For All

It is probably true that pupils have much higher ICT levels of ability than many of those in the teaching profession. ICT is the new literacy skills and teachers have to grasp any available opportunity to enhance their ICT skills if they are to use it in the teaching and learning process. Pupils cannot be expected to become adepted at the new technologies if the teachers themselves do not fully appreciate the potentials of these technologies.

Continuous professional development is the key to effective technology integration. Teachers need to access the technology as much as the students. They need longer time to acquire the new skills and to integrate technology into the curriculum. Thorough integration of ICT into the learning process will fundamentally change the role of teachers. Teachers will have less instructional role and more guidance function.

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Technical Support

The technical support strategy should focus on how to deliver reliable ICT services at all hours of the day with minimum downtime. These services should be determined by the overall ICT strategy as defined by the end-users. In SMJK Dindings, technical support strategy is related to the overall ICT strategy headed by the principal and assisted by system administrators who are IT teachers and the ex-students of the school. The technical support are categorized into hardware and software support. The hardware purchasing policy is to purchase refurbished equipment from computer hardware vendors who are able to provide up to 5 years, online support, warranty on spare parts and labour. The hardware suppliers can also be a useful source of technical knowledge about the products they sell and at the same time provide specialist technical support services when necessary. Computer peripherals are purchased from online auction sites such as eBay.com and lelong.com.my. Well stocked spare parts enable the support team to instantly replace faulty peripherals to minimize downtime thus ensuring maximum availability of the system.

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The Technological Infrastructure – An integrated school network

Another commonly used term for an integrated network is a ‘Whole School Network’ or Campus Area Network. School will become more and more dependent on their ICT infrastructure to deliver all aspects of their work. It will be vital to ensure that the technological infrastructure is correctly specified to meet the daily curriculum tasks. In SMJK Dindings, the whole school is connected by a single cabling structure following the TIA/EIA 568 specifications, including administrative and curriculur fields. The Local Area Networking is scalable, star topology and Ethernet compliant. The Local Area Network linking each classroom, administrative office, counseling centre, library and science laboratories are connected via UTP Cat.5+ cable. In terms of physical networking hardware, the Campus Area Network consists of gigabits Ethernet (1000Mbps) backbone with switched 100Mbps connections to the desktop. SMJK Dindings is equipped with a data centre consolidating all the servers into one central location which serves to provide network resources to four separate networks.

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Leadership Is The Key Ingredient

When I became the principal of SMJK Dindings in 1992, I envisaged that ICT would be one of the key strategies for improving the school in terms of teaching, learning, communications and administration.

After much discussion with Parent & Teacher Association, Board of Governors, staff and IT professionals, a strategic school building plan with ICT infrastructure was drawn up.

Vision of SMJK Dindings

The Leadership (Principal, PTA, and BOG) of SMJK Dindings believes that Information & Communication Technology (ICT) is a core element for powerful learning environment. ICT is a tool for teaching and learning, extending rather than replacing learning that typically takes place in the classroom under teacher’s direction, to gain access to a wide variety of education resources, anytime and anywhere.

Mission

SMJK Dindings will provide a state-of-the-art Information and Communication Technology (ICT) system to enable students and teachers to gain access to a wide variety of education resources, anytime and anywhere. SMJK Dindings will strive to achieve the following:

• Easy access to ICT facilities for all
• Minimum downtime of ICT facilities
• Information anytime & anywhere

There are seven challenges and barriers in integrating ICT into school curriculum.

• 1. Leadership is The Key Ingredient
  2. The Technological Infrastructure
  3. Technical Support
  4. The ICT Training Program
  5. Easy Access & Monitoring
  6. Content Creation & Electronic Learning Community
  7. Teachers’ Readiness To Use And Teach Using ICT

SMJK Dindings is a “Bantuan Modal” (partially aided) school where the government is responsible for teachers’ salaries and some administrative expenses. Faced with a limited financial constrain for development, SMJK Dindings managed to work with various interested parties to build and deploy one of the most advanced ICT infrastructure in school in this part of the world. The challenges and the barriers encountered in the integration process defy imaginations. The successful integration of ICT into the education system is mainly due to the commitment by the management of the school, the ICT infrastructure and training programs and the easy access to ICT facilities. The utilization of Open Source software such as squidGuard for Internet filtering, Pykota for print monitoring, web-based School Management System, real-time Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) online attendance, merit and demerit systems are some of the indicators to the successful integration of ICT into school curriculum.