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Feb. 27, 2004 Information Technology and Education: Impressions from visiting a Hong Kong Primary School Bipin Indurkhya, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology

On 2 Dec. 2003, I visited the Po Leung Kuk Castar Primary School in Hong Kong. This visit was organized by the International Conference on Computers and Education, and its main purpose was to show us how Information Technology (IT) is being used in this school. The Po Leung Primary School is a public school located in the suburbs of Hong Kong. It sits amidst tall apartment building, where most of the students come from, interspersed with parks and greenery. The seven-story school building is relatively new, as is most of the other equipment. The floors are assigned in the increasing order of grades, so that the first-grade classrooms are on the first floor, the second-grade classrooms are on the second floor and so on, with the teaching staff rooms being on the top floor. We started our tour from the top floor, working our way down. The interesting thing to see in the staff room was the arrangement of teacher's desks. For each grade, the four desks for the homeroom teachers of each of the four sections were arranged as quadrants of a square, with each teacher facing the center of the square. A low partition separated the quadrants allowing the teachers some privacy, but also enabling them to consult with each other, to pass books or papers back and forth, and so on. Such attention to details we were to notice often during our visit. There are three aspects of the way in which IT is being used and integrated in this school that stand out in my mind. The first is the equipment and facilities. All but two classrooms had a computer with a broadband Internet access and a computer-screen projector. This made it possible so that any teacher can use the web-based resources for any subject, as well as material prepared using powerpoint etc. Each classroom also had facilities to use notebook computers by the students, not at their desks but along the walls of the room. There were two large computer rooms, with maybe 40 or 50 computers each with scanners, printers and all. One room was arranged in the traditional way, with rows and rows of computers. But the other room was arranged with the computers grouped in clusters of 3 or 4, thereby allowing small groups of students to collaborate on a project. The Po Leung Primary School is also a part of the eSchool Bag pilot scheme in Hong Kong, in which the students get an electronic school bag consisting of a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or a notebook computer with a wireless connection to the school's Local Area Network and the Internet. This allows the students access to information and an ability to communicate to their peers anywhere: in school halls, in playground, and so on. Such facilities promote interactive learning and group collaboration. Another noteworthy aspect of using IT in education at this school is its approach in regarding IT strictly as a tool. To appreciate its novelty, consider that many approaches to computer in education take the view that one needs to develop specialized software (and sometimes hardware too) in order to use computers effectively in the curriculum. For example, there might be some special software to increase the students' math ability, or some kind of multimedia simulation to help them learn about history, and so on. The thinking at the Po Leung Primary School seems to be that such approaches are too labor intensive, require specialized training for the teachers, and their application is much too narrow and specific. Consequently, the approach taken here is to use general tools, such as web browsers, search engines, presentation software like powerpoint, to assist teaching and learning. A byproduct of this approach is that the skills the students acquire in using these tools better prepare them to face the age of IT outside the classroom and school. However, the most striking aspect of using IT in education at this school, for me at least, was the shift in pedagogical model that has been brought about. Towards the end of our visit, we met some fifth- and sixth-graders to hear about their perspective on the impact of using IT on learning. The sixth-graders gave a little presentation on learning then and now. The most noticeable pedagogical shift seems to be in the roles of students and teachers. In the traditional model of learning, the teacher is seen as holding the knowledge or skills that have to be somehow channeled into the students. In this model, the role of IT is merely to facilitate this rather one-way communication. In the new model, students and teachers are seen as collaborators working together to learn about new things. Here, IT is used as a tool to consult various sources of knowledge (over the Internet, for example), and to communicate with one another to build knowledge in a collaborative way. An effect of this pedagogical shift could already be seen in the enthusiasm of the students - their bright faces and their eagerness to learn and share their experiences with us.

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