Visit on a primary School in Sheung Shui

Recently, I visited a primary school in Sheung Shui, which is partnered with Microsoft to be one of the 12 pioneer schools in the world. The school try to promote an environment that to let students to bring no textbook /exercise book but just one laptop for learning and some assignments and to create more opportunities to let students to use technology.

Students using laptops as their textbooks.

As the students are not required to buy any textbook, the school cooperated with the publishers and developed a set of school-based “e-textbooks” and are pre-installed to the students’ laptop. Students can read their “textbooks” anytime anywhere they want by just clicking the file inside their laptops. The concept of e-textbook is not only converting traditional textbook to the electronic one, but it contains some interactive e-learning resources such as flash games, other teaching resources like video, animations or reference website are involved as well. The contents of the e-textbooks are based on the teaching plans that the teachers designed and the publishers’ role are to develop the software and related teaching materials according to the teaching plan submitted by the teachers.

 I had a chance to observe a maths lesson in this school. The teacher tried to use computer and intelligence whiteboard to aid her teaching and students were asked to form groups to use laptops to finish the tasks and report to the whole class afterwards.

Students finish their tasks on laptops.

The school stated that by introducing smart whiteboard, teachers are not needed to prepare a lot of real teaching aid or model etc and students’ learning interest can be improved.

Intelligence Whiteboard

 I totally agreed that, by introducing technology, students’ burden can be eased. Nowadays, the weight of students’ schoolbag is a hot topic to be concerned by parents and doctors. The concept of using notebooks to substitute the traditional textbooks may help students and could break the barrier of the traditional textbooks.

However, from what I observed from the lesson, no matter the teacher used the smart whiteboard to draw pictures to explain the ideas or the students use the laptops to finish some tasks. I believed that, something similar can be done even without laptops or smart whiteboard

I have a question in my mind: The introduction of I.T to school is a good approach, but how can we teach or learn through using IT properly or meaningfully instead of using it because of those facilities are expensive or it is the school policy? This just fit what I saw from the slide: No important impact can be expected when the same old activity is carried out with a technology that makes is a bit faster or easier; the activity itself has to change... ~ Salomon, Perkins and Globerson, 1991, p.8

After the visit, I believed that "How to use I.T resources properly to foster learning and make teaching and learning to be more effective and interesting" is an important issue to address.