ICT to play key role in new education system

Taken from, http://www.bt.com.bn/en/home_news/2007/12/10/ict_to_play_key_role_in_new_education_system

ICT to play key role in new education system

Going online: ICT lecturer Mike Moroney says that the new national education system will utilise ICT in teaching and learning. Picture: Nurkhayrul Salam
Nurkhayrul SalamBRUNEI-MUARA

Monday, December 10, 2007

THE use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) as a teaching and learning tool will begin to take a central role in enhancing the learning process in line with the new, 21st century national educational system. In keeping abreast with the advances of ICT, changes will be made to more school subjects to incorporate the use of ICT, according to Mike Moroney, an ICT lecturer at the Department of Educational Foundation at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. "Under the SPN21, nearly every subject will have content warranting the use of Internet," he said. "What is happening right now in form six is that they are putting in what we call Course Management System (CMS), which means that teachers can put more information on-line for students to download."In his explanation of the new system, the lecturer referred to his working paper, Moodle - Using Laptops and Wireless Access Effectively, which he presented during the third SHBIE Annual Seminar/Workshop in Education at the university from November 19 to 21 this year.Increasingly popular among teachers and students all over the world, Moodle provides the opportunity for teachers to employ a wide range of educational styles unavailable in traditional classroom environments.In particular are on-line forums which can be used for asynchronous communication between students, giving them the opportunity to become participants in a learning community. "The on-line forum will enable better communication amongst students and teachers. If they have a problem they can just log on, talk to each other, explain things and share ideas. This is better than just going to textbook and copying the answers," he said.Furthermore, the features of the application can significantly reduce a teacher's workload, whereby teachers are able to set up lessons that link to existing internet resources and to create assessment events that are easily monitored, and in some cases automatically marked.The recent advances in the quality and quantity of technology in Brunei schools, he pointed, has made it feasible to use Moodle effectively. The availability of portable computers and wireless access to the Internet will see many more schools realising that it is now practical and feasible to use CMS technology.Presently, this popular open source software is being used on a relatively small scale in Brunei's secondary schools, and more extensively in UBD.He also commented on how some teachers are reluctant try new technology ideas unless they are sure that it is going to help the lesson. "Some technology can take a huge amount of time to set up. As an example, the student I taught this semester took 60 hours to complete a project on technology. In reality, how many teachers in Brunei have 60 hours to spare?" he said.Another advantage of the application, he said, is the ease of learning the use of the CMS application. This enables teachers to quickly develop lessons that integrate technology into their classroom, without getting bogged down learning how to use application packages."Sometimes teachers are trained to use application packages which they find they can't use for a long time," he commented. "In my opinion, for any training to work, it is really important to apply what has been learnt straight away and with Moodle, the are plenty of opportunities to do so."

The Brunei Times