Environmental Scan Project Summary (PDF)

Future Schools is an innovative program in Singapore that combines pedagogy, research and information communications technology companies to test and showcase powerful learning technologies in school settings.

“Future Schools supports the spread of successful innovations through the close integration of pedagogy, research and technology. Schools are now able to engage students at a the higher level empowering them to succeed in tomorrow’s world.”

In the overview video below, Lim Boon Sheng, Principal at Beacon School testifies to the benefits:

“The pupils are learning the 21st century competencies and they are able to carry themselves with confidence. I have observed the collaborative learning they are engaging in as well as the self-directed learning that they are able to assume”

Some of the innovative technologies include:

• Virtual learning environments
• Educational games
• Customized thematic lessons
• 4D immersive lab (this one is especially impressive!)
• Multimedia content designed for personalized learning
• Essay marking engine (teachers will like this one!)
• Digital textbooks
• Borderless learning environments
• Mobile learning hardware and apps

Eugenia Lim, Principal, Crescent Girls School explains:

“We want to transform learning. We want to harness technology in ways that make learning exciting, experiential, and engaging for the students.”

At the the Hwa Chong Institution, the focus is on engineering a borderless learning environment. Their I-Learning Management System provides a gateway to a range of tools and databases that enables self-directed learning.

“Students can now find all of their learning resources on this website. It makes learning much more easy and much more interesting”, says student Ng Yan Xuan

At Jurong Secondary School, the focus is on problem-based learning. They are using a tool called vltrek that enables teachers to create lesson plans to incorporate the whole learning process into a lesson module. Another tool they use, Interactive Learning Trails, has been designed to support field work with 2D and 3D visualization features so students can take their learning outside the classroom.

Ilham B. Jalal, a student at Jurong Secondary School says, “using learning trails has made learning easy and fun for me because it allows me to learn through real life experiences.”

Principal Tham Kine Thong says they:

“hope to bring about innovative teaching in order to have engaged learning. We believe that learning should not be confined within the classroom. We should be learning to see how we can better engage the world through the use of technology”.

The interesting aspect of the Future Schools @ Singapore program is how closely they have integrated educational technology research and commercialization along with innovative learning programs in the pilot school’s classrooms.

Rather than the investment in technology being the usual burdensome cost, they have creatively set the Future Schools @ Singapore program up in a way that can spur economic growth while pushing the envelope on advanced educational tools. It looks like a real win-win-win situation for the students, schools and education technology companies.

Singapore is an especially interesting case study as its students consistently score in the top three in international academic tests in math, sciences and languages.

How did Singapore get to such an advanced state? This presentation by the Honorary Ng Eng Hen, Minister of Education, Singapore at the Building Blocks for Education conference in Ontario, shares the progressive approach they took, now into their third, five-year plan. It’s an inspiring presentation that is well worth watching in full.

The Honorary Ng Eng Hen describes the benefits of education leader sharing stories.

I think as educators today, we have the benefit of a growing body of research and evidence-based data to make more effective education policies… as I travel, I am struck when I meet with education ministers elsewhere, I’m struck by how the corollary also holds true that with greater access and reach, literally all education systems are held more accountable as comparisons between systems are often studied and published. …. But as leaders of education in our respective countries, I think we can benefit from these ongoing trends and learn from the experience and best practices from one another.

In addition to a strong focus on training principals, and offering competitive compensation and career paths for teachers, Singapore has what the Honorable Minister Hen calls “ICT-infused pedagogy and curriculum.”

…We took a progressive approach. We started this in the 1990s. We are now into our third wave, each wave is five years. In the first wave was basically equiping schools, in the second wave we shifted from a one-size-fits-all approach and gave more autonomy to school leaders to decide how best to integrate ICT into teaching and learning. We are now into our third master plan. We have made it easier for teachers to pool their ideas and share their resources, now again on the lines of decentralization. We have created platforms without being too prescriptive, what you see is an edumall where teachers can share… this is a connecting platform.  They share their lessons and their plans.

Singapore with its Future Schools program allows innovative schools to be pathfinders.

We are at the stage where we don’t have a monolithic structure. We allow different schools to experiment and we have an iterative structure…  One of the problems of decentralization is this issue of accountability. Autonomy and accountability need to go hand in hand…

Interestingly, test scoring only accounts for 15% of the school’s assessment process. They have a broader approach to assessment.

They are basically assessed on whether they can deliver realistic education to the student, how effective their teaching is, how well they develop strength of character, teamwork and leadership skills among the students. We spent many years refining this.

What next? We want to prepare our young for their future… we believe students today like you and me will need new skills, and 21st century skills, language skills, expansive worldwide view, ability to work in diverse teams… we call them the knowledge skills and values system… a values based education.

After hearing Mr. Hen’s inspiring presentation, you may be eager to get out the cookie cutters to try and replicate Singapore’s approach in its entirety in your local jurisdiction but he cautions against this.

Culture is a distinct aspect in every system and I would be very reluctant to say that what we have done are generic lessons that you can learn from.  What I have done is basically just share with you how we got here and for you to see what is applicable.

Mr. Hen is being very humble here but there’s no doubt a lot of valuable lessons shared that can work well in other jurisdictions as well. In many ways, Singapore’s Future School truly foreshadows where many “regular” schools today will be in the coming years ahead.

Resources:
FSSGCaseStudy

Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA)

Collaboration Opportunities Phase 2

An Interview with Singapore’s Minister of Education

Here is an excerpt:

As a business leader you are probably just starting to contend with social networks in your business and often find them to be of questionable value. The social enterprise is being touted as the next big thing: the new way to do business, a social way to do business.
But the next big thing in collaboration is crowds, not social. Social is only a new method of connecting and discovering information; social does not enable and guide action.

Business is about delivering results, and for that you need a crowd. I define a “crowd” as a network that drives an outcome, task or goal that has business value. This piece aims to demonstrate how crowds will add value to your business and shows some examples of what work in the future might look like using this largely untapped resource.

I will post the case study developed from my interview with Gary Korte shortly.

The skill that we teach in school is really what we call educational bulimia. We teach them memorization and regurgitation of information. In a 24/7 Wikipedia world, the skill of being able to remember a significant amount of information is not really a skill that is in demand. Being able to repeat that information is not necessarily something that is needed. The skills, like I said and we have talked about before, about being able to deal with different types of media, being able to communicate and collaborate with people that are not only in the room but on the other side of the planet, the ability to solve problems constantly in real time, those are skills that are needed and that is the difference between school smart and street smart

Have teachers inadvertantly become a bottleneck to learning?

” … the instructional approach in school builds what we call a culture of dependency … dependency on the teacher, dependency on the text book … where the job of students is to sit and be told exactly what to do, how to do it, and then to be tested on regurgitating that same piece of information.”

Do we need to move from a “just in case” to more of a “just in time” learning approach?

Kids in particular, they do not use Google the same way that you and I would use Google to search for something. The first place they go is to YouTube, because when they want to learn something, they want to learn it just in time. The philosophy of ‘just in time learning’ to them means they want to know how to fix a mountain bike until it is time to fix a mountain bike. They don’t want to learn how to fix a mountain bike six months before that, they want to learn it when they need that skill.

School provides a very structured environment where we do just in case learning … It is a complete disconnect between their style of learning and our traditional style of teaching. They have learned to be able to access information and to learn in real time. School provides a very structured environment where we do ‘just in case learning,’ where the reason that we tell students they need this piece of information is just in case it is going to be on this exam, just in case you might want to become an engineer or a doctor, or something like that, just in case you want to go to a university, and that is not really something that make sense to them. It is a complete disconnect between their style of learning and our traditional style of teaching.

“Technology has transformed the way we live, work and play. We can communicate across oceans and continents within seconds. We can bank, shop and donate securely from the convenience of our homes or offices. We can work remotely, even in planes, without losing productivity and often increasing it. We can entertain ourselves with a plethora of books, videos and games – accessible at a moment’s notice through the Internet.

Yet our school system remains, by and large, the same as it was fifty years ago. The overwhelming majority of students attend a brick and mortar school for a set number of hours on a set number of days based primarily on the agrarian calendar. Students sit at desks and consume content in textbooks that may already be outdated.

The report sees an important role for technology.

… Technology has the power and scalability to customize education so each and every student learns in his or her own style at his or her own pace, which maximizes the chances for success in school. It offers teachers an effective way to overcome challenges and better educate students of all learning needs.

Digital learning is the great equalizer. It holds the promise of extending access to rigorous high quality instruction to every student across America, regardless of language, zip code, income levels, or special needs. New tools and improved services will help schools diagnose and address special learning needs more efficiently and effectively.

Source:
Digital Learning Now Report FINAL