Embedding Digital Technologies in Teaching And Learning - A Comparative Study Of School Systems in Singapore And Scotland


Book Description

The role of technology has exponentially grown in education, especially with the school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Countries like Singapore and Scotland have historically invested in educational technology and have successfully created Smart Nations and citizens. This book is based on comparative research conducted between school education systems in Scotland and Singapore. It attempts to identify the key characteristics to determine the level of embeddedness of digital technologies within the education systems of the respective countries. The study further compares the use of digital technologies as an educational response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The book gets interesting with the in-depth findings from each of the systems. During these unprecedented times, when home-based learning (HBL) using technology is inevitable, the findings of the study are highly relevant and provide insights on HBL, digital technologies, and schooling in these countries. Going forward, the role of digital technologies in education will substantially grow. The recommendations provided in this book can only facilitate improving the process/level of embedding digital technology in teaching and learning across the school systems.




Diversifying Schools


Book Description

This book discusses the strategies that the Singapore Education System has embarked to encourage school change and innovations. It documents the change journey of Specialized Schools and Future Schools in Singapore with a view to understand the key tenets that enable school wide change and reform. The intents for change and reform are to anchor the education system to the basic foundations and principles of education and yet enable the system as a whole to be malleable to change and globalization. It shows how Singapore enables diversity within a structured environment through innovations in Specialized and Future Schools, and highlights the systemic rationale behind various efforts in Specialized and Future Schools and the kinds of adaptations schools have made to leverage structures and make adjustments for their contexts.




Digital Technology in Education Systems Around the World


Book Description

This report reviews the approaches and strategies developed and implemented by 14 countries and jurisdictions to support digital education: New South Wales, Australia; Estonia; Finland; Germany; Ireland; Japan; New Zealand; Poland; Portugal; Qatar; Scotland, UK; Singapore; Slovenia; and South Korea. It addresses improved and enhanced teaching and learning, including teachers' competencies and digital literacy, student's literacy and numeracy, and students' digital literacy, plus the issues of digital maturation and wellbeing, and digital wellbeing. In the area of education system operations and support the review considers evidence-based education and data driven decision making, Artificial Intelligence, tackling digital inequalities by addressing the digital divides, improving teacher self-efficacy with continuing professional development, and avoiding reform fatigue by increasing stakeholder involvement. [Publisher summary, ed]




Digital Technology, Schools and Teachers' Workplace Learning


Book Description

This book advances an alternative reading of the social, political and cultural issues surrounding schools and technology and develops a comprehensive overview of the interplay between policy, practice and identity in school workplaces. It explores how digital technologies have become an integral element of the politics and socially negotiated practices of school workplaces as school campuses are now awash with digital hardware and growing amounts of school work is carried out on a 'virtual' basis.




The Use of Information Technology for the Management of Education in Singapore


Book Description

This case study of the use of information technology for the management of education in Singapore is published as a guide to good practice in the use of IT for management of education systems.




Learning and Teaching with Technology in the Knowledge Society


Book Description

This book discusses learning and teaching with modern technology in the new knowledge society. It focuses specifically on new literacy and technology in classroom environments. Based on a social-constructivist approach, this book covers a wide range of new technology use examples, such as participatory media, video recording systems and 3D computer graphics. A case study on a constructivist approach to teaching and learning, especially CSCL (computer supported collaborative learning), is discussed from a practical perspective for educators. It also includes specific in-class practices with detailed accounts of curricula featuring readily accessible yet new technology available for classroom use, such as Google Sketchup 3D computer models.




Inquiry into the Singapore Science Classroom


Book Description

This book offers an insight into the research and practices of science teaching and learning in the Singapore classroom, with particular attention paid to how they map on to science as inquiry. It provides a spectrum of Singapore’s science educational practices through all levels of its education system, detailing both successes and shortcomings. The book features a collection of research and discourse by science educators in Singapore, organized around four themes that are essential components of approaching science as inquiry: teachers’ ideas and their practices, opportunities and constraints from a systemic level, students’ competencies and readiness to learn through inquiry and the need for greater awareness of the role of informal learning avenues in science education. In addition, the discourse within each theme is enriched by commentary from a leading international academic, which helps to consolidate ideas as well as position the issues within a wider theoretical and international context. Overall, the papers set out important contexts for readers to understand the current state of science education in Singapore. They also highlight strengths and gaps in practices of science as inquiry as well as provide suggestions about how the system can be improved. These research findings are therefore helpful as they provide honest and evidence-based feedback as well as tangible and doable ideas that policy makers, teachers, students and school administrators can adopt, adapt and enhance.




New Media and Learning in the 21st Century


Book Description

This volume brings together conceptualizations and empirical studies that explore the socio-cultural dimension of new media and its implications on learning in the 21st century classroom. The authors articulate their vision of new-media-enhanced learning at a global level. The high-level concept is then re-examined for different degrees of contextualization and localization, for example how a specific form of new media (e-reader) changes specific activities in different cultures. In addition, studies based in Singapore classrooms provide insights as to how these concepts are being transformed and implemented by a co-constructive effort on the part of researchers, teachers and students. Singapore classrooms offer a unique environment to study the theory-practice nexus in that they are high achieving, implicitly grounded in the eastern cultural values and well-equipped with ICT infrastructure. While these studies are arguably the state-of-the-art exemplars that synergize socio-cultural and technological affordances of the current learning environments, they also serve as improvable ideas for further innovations. The interplay between theory and practice lends support to the reciprocal improvements for both. This book contributes to the continuing debate in the field, and will lead to better learning environments in the 21st century.




Creating Holistic Technology- Enhanced Learning Experiences


Book Description

Creating Holistic Technology-Enhanced Learning Experiences: Tales of a Future School in Singapore Editors: Lee Yong TAY & Cher Ping LIM The global level of economic, ecological, social, political and cultural integration across nation states and the rapid advancement of technology have brought about transformations that are part of globalisation. Our students are expected to be agents of change rather than passive observers of world events; and at the same time, to live together in an increasingly diverse and complex society and to reflect on and interpret fast changing information. In such a new world order, the holistic development of our students, namely in the cognitive, aesthetics, physical, social and moral, leadership and global domains, is pivotal. This edited book provides descriptive and interpretive accounts of how an elementary school in the FutureSchools@Singapore programme creates holistic technology-enhanced learning experiences for its students at the classroom and school levels. By documenting these accounts and linking them to student learning outcomes, the school will lead the way in providing possible models for the seamless and pervasive integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) into the curriculum for the holistic development of our students.




Schools and Schooling in the Digital Age


Book Description

This book tackles the wider picture, addressing the social, cultural, economic, political and commercial aspects of schools and schooling in the digital age, offering to make sense of what happens, and what does not happen, when the digital and the educational come together in the guise of schools technology.