Nan Chiau Primary School in Sengkang, Singapore in collaboration with Qualcomme and Microsoft will empower its students and teachers through custom-tailored mobile application enabling 24/7 access to educational resources.

Under the WE learn mobile education project, which uses 3G smartphones to create seamless classroom experience, some 350 third-grade pupils and teachers will experience the latest wireless technology that will ease a student-centric model of learning where educational materials can be accessed anytime and anywhere via smartphones.

The project is being supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) under the ICT masterplan in education to designate Nan Chiau Primary School as a model for primary schools throughout Singapore and Asia.

“By equipping students with learning tools like mobile phones, our students have 24/7 access to educational content, web-based resources, and collaborative learning tools”, said Mr Tan Chun Ming, principal of Nan Chiau Primary School.

“These tools give students the means to take responsibility for their own learning and enable teachers to provide individualized mentoring”, Chun Ming added.

All smartphones are equipped with MyDesk, a mobile learning platform to enable each student to access his or her assignments, relevant websites that contain podcasts, textual material and video clips and educational applications, such as mapping, drawing and animating, to practice both self-directed and collaborative learning.

Files created by the Nan Chiau students on their smartphones are backed-up and synchronized to a cloud-based teaching management system, providing each student an electronic portfolio that parents can review and teachers can access for grading and feedback purposes.

The national Institute of Education of Singapore is assisting teachers with the development of customised curriculum in English, Science and Chinese, and co-design technology to enable teachers to enact lessons using smartphones to support the students’ personalized learning, revealed Professor Looi Chee Kit, The National Institute of Education who is responsible for the WE learning project.

Nan Chiau Primary School is Singapore’s first school to set up the Centre for Educational Research and Application (CERA), the research centre for using ICT in teaching and learning in a primary school.

(Source: FutureGov)
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