INTRODUCTION
Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) has become very powerful tool recently for imparting knowledge
and training students to face the challenges posed by the information-based global
economy and development. A result, this has increase in the demand for basic computing
hardware in schools and higher institution all around the country. Paradigm
shift from pencil and paper-based teaching to an ever-increasing reliance on electronic
learning has been aware by governments.
Hence, respective education policies
stressing on the need for greater technology access for students. In order to
achieve the full potential of ICT for enhancing the learning experience, it is
vital to increase the number of students with access to computers. The
retrofitted PCs offer an attractive and cost-effective opportunity for
installing computers in 10,000 schools across the country. PC refurbishment
forms an integral component for the success of programs such as the Smart
School initiative in Malaysia.
The former Prime Minister of
Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad conceptualized the Vision 2020 plan for the
country. This vision aimed to map out the steps required for a sustained growth
in the long term and achieve all the desired economic and social objectives by
2020. A technologically literate and analytically thinking population forms the
cornerstone of this vision. This coupled with the education system’s aim to
nurture students into spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally inclined
individuals, lead to the formulation of the Smart School Concept. Smart School
is a flagship application of the Multimedia Super Corridor.
BACKGROUND
OF SMART SCHOOL
The Malaysian Smart School is
defined as learning institutions that have been systematically reinvented in
terms of teaching-learning practices and school management in order to prepare
children for the information age. The Smart School Flagship was one of the
seven applications identified under the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC)
initiative. The MSC Smart School Flagship Application is a collaborative effort
between the Ministry of Education (MoE) and the Multimedia Development
Corporation (MDeC). The Telekom Smart School (TSS) industry consortium provided
the ICT expertise for the initiative.
The history of the Smart School project
is rooted in the two-pronged objectives of the flagship, which are to jumpstart
the MSC towards building a knowledge-based economy, contributing to the growth
of the ICT industry and creating a pool of talent resulting in high-value job
creation. The other one is to prepare the citizens for the information age
through an innovative education delivery process.
The Ministry of Education started to
conceptualise the Malaysian Smart School in 1996 and subsequently began its
3-year pilot phase with 88 pilot schools in 1999. Pilot schools are 88
residential and non-residential primary and secondary schools located in rural
and urban areas throughout Malaysia that participated in the study to make all
10,000 schools in Malaysia smart by 2010.
The aim of the Smart School is to
change the culture and practices of Malaysia’s schools, moving away from
rote-memory learning toward fostering creative thinking skills. Smart schools
are provided with computerized classrooms and LCD projectors, electronic
resource centre, computers in science labs, self-access centres and WIFI
hotspots. The other ICT initiatives are TV Pendidikan and Pelaksanaan Pengajaran Sains dan Matematik dalam Bahasa Inggeris
(PPSMI); teaching of science and mathematics in English in 2003.
GOALS AND STRATEGIES
The implementation of smart school
have five goals and strategies that need to be fulfil which is provide
all-round development of the individual, provide opportunities to enhance
individual strengths and abilities, produce a thinking and technology literate
workforce, democratise education and increase participation of stakeholders.
The first goal is to provide
all-round development of the individual like intellectual, physical, emotional
and spiritual. Intellectual is focus on getting the knowledge. It is also focus
on searching, generating, and using knowledge toward creative thinking skills.
Then, about the physical is the responsibility and consciousness of student
toward life. The development in emotional and spiritual are related to moral
and good values. This is included the emotional balance and emotional
intelligence.
The second goal is to provide
opportunities to enhance individual strengths and abilities. The strategies of
this goal are to provide elective in the curriculum and allow for vertical
integration. The vertical integration means that grade levels students for all
subject in the school curriculum.
Third, to produce thinking and
technology-literate workforce, students will be teach to have the thinking
across the curriculum. The application of technology is applied in teaching and
learning to produce a technology-literate student. In the smart school, the use
of technology like internet as a teaching- learning material is the best ways
to produce children who are have different learning style than another school.
The forth goals of the Smart School
Project is democratise education. The Smart School programmes provide equal
access to learning opportunities. In Smart School Curriculum, students enable
to have holistic learning because the curriculums involve all significant
aspect of life. The uses of technology as one delivery system gives students
the skills they need to use technology such as internet to get more
information. Other than that, the Smart School programme also provide for
differing abilities, style and paces of learning. The teachers have to ensure
that the students gain equal access to quality learning and allowing for
self-paced learning. To accommodate the variety in students, teachers should
make different types of lesson and learning experience to motivate the students
in classroom.
The last goal of the Smart School
Project is increase the participation of stakeholders. These goals involve a
few strategies that can be due to fulfil the goal, which is to create awareness
of what happens in schools. All the stakeholders must know their
responsibilities and give feedback so that the Smart School project is known
whether it is working or not. The participation of the stakeholders such as
parent, community, and private will allow the exchange of experiences and ideas
for smart school project. Finally yet importantly, they can launch the parents
web site for each smart school so that the school and the parents side can
change idea concerning about the smart school project.
COMPONENT
IN SMART SCHOOL
There are several components in
smart school such as teaching and learning processes, technology, management
and administration, human resources, skills and responsibilities and the
policies. The first component is the teaching and learning processes in smart
school. The Smart School will enable students to practice self-accessed and
self-directed learning. Students can learn their own pace. The processes
relating to curriculum, pedagogy, assessments, and teaching learning materials,
are reinvented to help students learn more effectively and efficiently. This
process related with the use of information technology (IT).
As the second component in smart
school, technology is used as an enabler not only in teaching and learning, but
also in management, and communications among the stakeholders. The management
and administration of the Smart School, which represents the driver of the
Smart School, is computerised. Management software helps the Smart School
principals and headmasters to manage more efficiently and effectively the
resources and processes required to support the teaching-learning functions.
Third component is human resources,
skills and responsibilities. Parents, community, and private sector as the
stakeholders, play active roles in improving the performance of the school. All
these parties are constantly involved school management, teaching-learning, and
other aspects of the Smart School. Last component are the policies. The
policies is to ensure the successful implementation of the Smart School,
changes in existing policies as well as the formulation of the new policies and
regulations.
THE CHALLENGES AND
ISSUES IN INCEPTION OF SMART SCHOOLS
Implementation of smart school, the
main emphasis that should be concentrated by the school administration is wise
resources management. This is to make sure the school infrastructures are well
organized. Smart school is one of Ministry of Education long-term plan, which
the goal is to upgrade lesson contents and method in delivery the content to
the students. Thus, all the principals should have responsibilities to upgrade
and reconstruct the management system of school administration in order to
ensure smart school projects give positive result. However, we cannot deny
there are some challenges and obligation in smart school implementation.
A principal of a smart school has
complicated duty and need full commitment, as it is a big challenge to conduct
and organize the school well. Excellence and success of a school is depending
on the effectiveness of principal as leader of the school. As the smart school
related to computing system, so the principal has to emphasis and gives more
commitment on provide technology infrastructure such as laboratory, smart
whiteboard and media mass material. It is quite challenging because the
principal with the help of school administration staff has to plan wisely the
paper work to ensure the procedure is in order and run smoothly. Moreover, the
principle need to use school budget wisely as smart school is highly cost
especially their maintenances.
Furthermore, smart school also faced
problem to provide high quality and relevant teaching and learning materials
for the students although there is available instructions but it only suitable
for lower form students. The difficulty in obtained software for upper form
students will give trouble to the principal and school administration because
the teaching and learning materials that provided by Ministry of Education is
not enough to cover student numbers. Sometimes, materials provided by Ministry
of Education are delivering not in time. It may late for several months or even
received in the middle of school year session .In order to cover the problem
and ensure the teaching and learning process smoothly run, the school administration
has to provide alternative software by searching from other resources. Sometimes,
the alternative software may be piracy, hence principle need to be more cautious.
Principles and teacher must check the contents of the alternative software so
that is follow the national curricular contents.
In line with the smart school
mission and vision is to produce students of IT savvy the principals must prepare
themselves with technology knowledge and skills. Smart school principals must
have good appearance in the both physical and mental, honesty, selflessness,
self-confidence and ability to communicate with others. This is important as
the principals can use collaborative management for the success of the smart
school project. They are not only need to provide support in terms of money but
also be a model and made transformation in administration. In efforts to
cultivate ICT culture in a smart school, a written policy document should be
draw up. This policy will help to design and manage the ICT program, which
enable teachers and students to master in ICT systematically and progressive.
Moreover, teachers also have to face
the challenges with an open minded to make sure the smart school is success. Teachers
also must prepare themselves with ICT knowledge and skills. This is because
teachers have a big responsible to teach and deliver knowledge to the students.
The teachers must be able to think creatively and critically and beyond. The
teachers need to use computer intensively in their study, presentations,
teaching process and communication to diversify the use and application of ICT.
They need to increase their skills in handling electronic equipment so that they
can manage classroom with no hesitate and problems most of electronic equipment
is sensitive and difficult to handle by senior teachers such as LCD projector
and interactive whiteboard. Hence, class or short course need to held by school
administration to expose all teachers to new electronic equipment.
In addition the teachers are using
technology equipment and the infrastructures intensively in teaching process,
so there must be problems when the computers or equipment are damage or unable
to use and cause disruption of teaching process. Thus, this problem must overcome
smartly to ensure teaching and learning process progress smoothly. The best
solution is always kept them in proper schedule maintenance. However, the cost
of maintenance is very high, this may cause the repair, and maintenance processes
delayed or take long time. Hence, ministry of education should place at least
one professional technician in every school so that any minor damage can be
repair faster and save more time and budgets.
Next, they are also not ready to
achieve the objectives of smart school concept and learn new ICT programmes.
Besides, they are lack of exposure in how to use the technology. Thus, the
government have to overcome this problem by train the teachers to make sure
that teaching and learning process progress smoothly and effectively. The
teachers themselves have to adapt with the new concept of teaching and
learning. Smart schools arise with new concept, which differ than normal
school. One of smart school concept is enable students to practice
self-accessed and self-directed learning. The learning processes reinvented to
help students learn more effectively and efficiently. Technology is used as key
enabler not only in teaching and in learning,
There is no exception for smart
school students to face the challenges in implementation of their smart school.
For several of smart school students, they are not well informing about the
unique features of smart school. They are unfamiliar with technology and electronic
equipment. They may come from non-academic family background. Hence, they
preferred to learn in traditional methods. Therefore, to overcome those
students problems, the number of students in smart school have should be limit.
Only the excellent students can enter to smart school because the learning styles
need students to can explore by themselves to gain knowledge and information.
They need to be more independent.
Actually,
the smart school students should be ready to accept and adapt with the new
transformation of teaching and learning process. They should be prepared
mentally and physically so that they can accept the changes and make as
initiative to improve their skills. It
is good if the exposure given by the teachers can help and increase the student’s
interest in learning process. In Smart School, most of student’s assessments are using a computer supported by an
internet. They have to learn
how to gather information from the internet. Unfortunately, some students do
not have an access to internet at home.
The
smart school students should ensure all taught that given by the teachers is a
useful knowledge. They need to give efforts to master at all. For the sake of
realize that, the smart school students should read and understand what
teachers have taught. They must always practice and do revision continuously in
order to become expert in ICT.
The
smart school itself have to face the challenges in implementation of smart
school. The smart school also lack of facilities. The computer laboratories are not in adequate
number. There are also hardware problems related to LANs, PCs and servers.
Furthermore, the breakdowns of electricity supply also one of the challenges.
This is due to inability of the existing system in school to cope with the
increase usage of electricity. Thus, the
authorities should play their roles in improving the management of smart
school. Moreover, the smart school software was not compatible with the
national textbook. Thus, the school has to upgrade the software in line with
national textbook. Each school need to have a system integration engineer who
has a broad range of skills including software and hardware engineering and
interface protocols.
ADVANTAGES AND
WEAKNESSES
There are several advantages and
weaknesses from Smart School project. It may involve students, teachers and the
school itself. On the other hand, the Ministry of Education (MoE) also has to
find the best solutions to solve the problems faced by people in this project.
This is very important to ensure the project will run effectively and
successfully. All men should cooperate to ensure all the problems are solved in
the best way; hence there will no waste of time, money, and energy in future so
that we can focus on other things.
Smart school is a school with new
and different environment as it may promote a better learning atmosphere.
Normal schools more to pencil and paper-based teaching where teachers and
students concentrated on traditional methods. On the other hands, smart schools
used more interactive electronic tools. Most of their contents of lesson are in
the form of presentation using power points, videos, simulation and others.
Students are exposed to new learning atmosphere, which better than before as
this lesson style more interactive and interesting. Students will experience
new learning process and will excite them to give more attention and
involvement in the class.
Furthermore, students of Smart
School usually quest for knowledge on their own and teachers just act as their
guidance or facilitators. Students are allowed to explore freely the
information. They may found videos, simulations or presentation slide, which
can help them to understand more on certain topics. The learning process is
more to student centred- autonomous learner and active learners. This learning
process will advanced students in future life as they may try to gather
information, analysis, conclude and solved the problems they faced
systematically. Active learners will always improve their skills and knowledge;
this is very important attitude if we want to produce future competence workers
in global world.
Smart schools are provided with
computerized classrooms and LCD projectors, electronic resource centre,
computers in science labs, self-access centres and WIFI hotspots. All this
equipment will help students and teachers to do more classes that are
efficient. Class well equip with computer, LCD projectors and others stuff will
increase their used by teachers and students. WIFI hotspots are essential as it
can helps students and teachers to use freely the internet to search and browse
information easily. Electronic resource centre and self-access centres are
important as WIFI hotspots as it can promote uses of ICT among students.
Lastly, uses of computer in science lab will increase the skills of science
students to face the outside world. Vision 2020 emphasized that Malaysia had to
embrace the knowledge economy in order to become globally competitive. Creating
an Information Communication Technology (ICT) literate society was a central
platform in achieving that transformation.
Furthermore, teachers are be able to
use the latest technology as a tool to enhance the teaching learning and
managing schools is part of being a smart education system. Hence, we can say
that technology is the key enabler for the Malaysian Smart Schools. The
Malaysian Smart School is a learning institution systemically reinvented in
terms of teaching learning practices and management system. This would improve
the workflow in place for submission and retrieval of lesson plan. The lesson
plans can also be reuse or share with other teacher, results in better lesson.
They can have discussion and so on. Besides, database of staff and students
record can be easily achieve for references. This reinvented learning institutions
would synergistically utilised the components of the Smart Schools, for
instance; the teaching learning, the management and administrations, the human
resources, the enabling technology, the schooling processes, and the
underlining supporting policies.
On the other hands, there are
several disadvantages of smart school project. Most of the students are not
completely ready to change their role from passive learner to self-directed
learner. From preschool to primary school, Malaysian students are trained by
spoon-fed style. The spoon-feeding practice is part of our Malaysian education
culture, which has long built its warm nest and is still very much alive.
Spoon-feeding is a common term, which literally means feeding one with a spoon
or metaphorically means giving no opportunity for one to think or act for
himself. Behavioural treatment given by teachers to students before that so
pampers and compromises self–development may impede independent learning and
can deter creativity and innovativeness among the students in general. When
they enter the smart school, some of them may not fit with this new culture and
cause some of them left behind. Hence, teachers as facilitator must give more
attention to them.
Moreover, students do not have an
enough opportunities to develop their critical thinking skill. In normal
schools, when teachers give certain topic, they are trigger to think about it
and try to give their ideas. Even this process of try and error, the critical
thinking skill may developed, and promote them to find the fit answer or best
solutions. Contrast to the student in smart school, all the information is can
be access easily as the computer and internet connection is provided in their
classroom. They can easily surfing the browser at the moment teachers give the
topic and start to discuss it. Their critical thinking skills not used
maximally. Sometimes, technology make people become more lazy as the technology
help to reduces human effort mentally and physically as they are created to
decrease the burden faced by men.
The cost to maintain smart school is
high than normal. In smart school, the maintenance for electronic equipment
every year may be higher as all this equipment is too sensitive and need expert
attention. The software used in schools
include word processing applications, Internet browsers, educational (drill and
practice) programs, spreadsheet and database applications, presentation
software, graphic programs, desktop publishing applications, e-mail software,
simulation programs, and so on, also cost more than normal school. Furthermore,
hidden costs in terms of shipping, storage, and hardware upgrades sometimes
tend to impose stress on the limited resources available to this project. The
Ministry of Education have to provide large amount of budget to ensure the
continuity of the smart schools project.
Furthermore, the site of readiness
of main player or server may be problem to rural area with bad network
connection. Some rural area in Malaysia still not provided with good network
connection. This smart school only can be developing in the urban area with
good network connection. Hence, the project cannot be implementing totally all
over the country. The opportunity for rural student to develop their ICT skill
is less than urban students, even the exposure to ICT world may late. It has
may take times to run smart school to rural area. Government should make steps
to repair network connection in selected area after surveying the chosen
project site. This is to ensure not only the school in urban areas have the
speciality to run smart school project. Until now, most of school in rural
areas left behind in school development. The equality in education system of
Malaysia does not achieve their goal yet as they still gap between rural and
urban areas.
CONCLUSION
schools are one of the initiatives of Ministry
of Education to improve students’ knowledge and skills to face the real world.
They are new generation that become the future leaders. They are future workers
need to compete with real global competitor.
Students need to learn more about ICT as this new era ICT become one of
the most important knowledge as we can see know, most of things around us is
surrounding by electronic equipment and we need ICT knowledge to handle it.
Smart school projects will help in planting the skills needed by students to
face their suture life. Even this project cost higher budget, the result from
this project may help country as more technologically literate and analytically
thinker is produced.
Smart school project should be continuously,
as it will help students in many ways even it is very difficult to maintain and
manage the schools rather than normal schools. The contents and skills provided
in this kind of schools are relevant to this era. People are desperately need
to learn and apply ICT in their daily life. Students should be updated to all
kind of technology so that they can compete with another and with people around
the world.
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