LESSON 3: EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
IN THE ASIA PACIFIC REGION
A.
Summary
To provide confidence to
educators that they are taking the right steps in adopting technology in
education, it is good to know that during the last few years, progressive
countries in the Asian Pacific region have formulated state policies and
strategies to infuse technology In school. The reason for thus move is not
difficult to understand since there is now a pervasive awareness that nation’s socio-economic
success in the 21st century is linked to how well it can complete in
a global Information and Communication technology (ICT) region. This imperative
among nations has therefore given tremendous responsibilities on educators to
create an educational technology environment in schools. And since it is
understood that the state policies will continue to change, it is helpful to
examine prevailing ICT policies and strategies of five progressive states/city,
namely; New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
New Zealand
The government with the education
and technology sectors, community groups, and industry envisions supporting to
the development of the capability of schools to use information and
communication technologies in the teaching and learning and in administration.
Their strategy is to improve learning outcomes for students using ICT to
support the curriculum. And they focus in infrastructure for increasing schools
access to ICTs to enhance education.
Australia
In the Adelaide declaration and
national goals for goals for schools, information technology is one of the
eight national goals/learning areas students should achieve. Students should be
confident, creative and productive users of new technologies, particularly ICTs,
and understand the impact of these technologies on society. The plans for
achieving the national goal for IT are left to individual states and
territories with Educational Network Australia (EdNa) as the coordinating and
advisory body.
Malaysia
Technology plays many roles in
Smart school from facilitating teaching-and-learning activities to assisting
with school management. Fully equipping a school includes; classrooms with
multimedia, presentation facilities, e-mail, and groupware for collaborative
work, and library media center with database for multimedia courseware and
network access to internet.
Singapore
The master plan has four key
dimensions;
1.
curriculum
and assessment
2.
learning
resources
3.
teaching
development
4.
physical
and technological infrastructure
Hong Kong
Government raises the quality of
school education by promoting the use of IT in teaching and learning. The IT
initiatives are; on average, 40 computers for each primary school and 82
computers for each secondary school, and about 85,000 IT training places for
each teacher at four levels.
B.
Experience
In the above summary, we really
can tell that technology has already penetrated the education system. It really
improved the teaching-learning process of the five developing countries. Here
in the Philippines, public schools lack of proper facilities in integrating
technology in the teaching-learning process, even private schools do not have
that proper technology just like the five countries above.
As a product of a public school,
I can really testify that Philippines are really far behind compared to the
other countries. Government has allotted big budget for the Department of
Education but despite of the big budget, still, public schools do not have that
proper facilities. Yes, some public schools has the computer laboratory and
with a few units of computers, where user and computer has ration of 5:1. This
is a sad reality that is experiencing in most public schools in the
Philippines.
C.
Reflection
As stated in the summary above,
government is really supporting each school to really pursue, the integration
of technology in Education system. They really are the one who wants to improve
their education system, which is a big help to the students. For this will
really give them a proper training.
In the Philippines, this is the
problem because we lack the support from our government which is the one who
can really help us in achieving this kind of improvements. We are really far
behind when we talk about technology, most specially in the public schools;
students don’t know how to manipulate computers. Some of them, instead of using
the computer as educational resources, this is use in a way that students will
lost in their attention to learning. Some of them use the technology as their
past time by playing in the computer instead of researching their assignment.
This is the reason why some of
the teachers who are not enrolled in educational technology subject, do not
allowed the school to integrate technology in the teaching-learning process,
because this they understand. Other reason also is that, they are afraid that
computers might replace teachers in the future.
D.
Application
Our government should adapt that
idea that we need to improve our educational system here in the Philippines.
Teachers also should need to be open minded in accepting that technology will
really improve our education system, to achieve the successful
teaching-learning process.
yeaaaaaa
TumugonBurahin