Making Connections Between the ESE and the Masterplans for ICT in Education

I was employed St. Andrew's Secondary School for my contract teacher stint, and deployed there during my ESE. There, the students are not affluent or "techno-wizards" of any kind, just casual users of end-user technology.
 

Therefore, I'm very glad to have witnessed students taking charge of their own learning and producing works; videos, articles and blogs, and maintaining content on the school webpage.
 

One video, in particular, was very encouraging. Boys working on a project for the Commonwealth Essay competition approached Mr. Tan Yan Ho, coordinator for the Secondary 3 level, asking if they could send a video entry instead of writing the conventional essay. They had a passion in making video, and the Mr. Tan, along with the school's Visual Art teacher, Mr. Finosh Philips, facilitated in their learning, offering lessons on video editing and effects production to equip the boys with the requisite skills to finish their task.
 

The end product was a trailer that encompassed good narrative technique from their storyboards, good cinematography for their level, and good special effects for beginners. The project contained many IT skills learnt in a short period of time, and it was mostly learner-centric since the boys were the ones asking the questions, taking the time to experiment independently and preparing all the materials for the shoot.
 

This ties in well in the Ministry's aim of "transforming the learning environment and equipping [students] with the critical competencies and dispositions to succeed in a knowledge economy".
 
The video was one of the many projects initiated at SASS, along with sports journalism, class blogging, and website maintenance, in a bid to tie in the students' passion with elevating their proficiency in the English Language.