The partners in the pilot project ' the Singapore Chinese Teachers' Union, East Zone Schools and Microsoft Corp. ' have taken the first steps to upload content onto the portal, but the success of the portal will ultimately depend on the participation of all teachers.
'Successful professional development via the portal can only take place if everyone is prepared to share and learn from each other,' said Yeo Guat Kwang, executive secretary, Singapore Chinese Teachers' Union.
Minister of Education Tharman Shanmugaratnam said the new portal will add momentum to the wave of innovations in Chinese language learning that is already happening in the schools. He cited the example of Tanjong Katong Girls' School, where teachers are riding on the popularity of blogs to get students to participate in online 'educational communities', where they share opinions and insights on current news topics. Their Internet journals are administered by teachers, who also participate actively in the blogs.
'The exploitation of IT by our teachers is not something unique to Singapore. However, there is considerable interest in Singapore's experience,' said Tharman.
He cited two reasons for this. 'First, we are infusing IT in teaching and learning in every school, right across our system, whereas in most other countries the meaningful infusion of IT is the privilege of a few schools ' such as 'experimental schools' or 'key schools' in China or 'smart schools' in Malaysia, or private schools which draw on their own funding.'
'Second our focus is on teachers, not on hardware. Technology is not innovation in itself. What really matters is how teachers themselves use technologies and software to craft and deliver lessons, and push their students to learn in new and sometimes unplanned ways. That's where the real value comes from when we use IT in education,' he said.
Membership of the portal will be initially available to Chinese language teachers from the East Zone schools and two clusters in the South Zone and will eventually be extended to about 3,500 Chinese language teachers across Singapore.
Chinese language teachers can register themselves at sgchinese.innovativeteachers.com to gain access to a library of resources including articles, tutorials and learning materials. The portal provides collaboration tools for teachers to engage in communities of practice and access a personal thinking and working space within the network. It also features a special forum for parents to exchange ideas, knowledge, solutions and experiences in the learning of Chinese language.