As regular visitors to my website would have read, I recently highlighted the inability of my son’s school to update parents through the Net, whether through emails or the school website. This is despite having suggested it to the school some months before. This got me thinking as to what I would like to see on a school website. I will be looking at it from the communications point of view, that is, communications with the stake holders of the school in mind.

The first thing I would like to see are regular updates of the school website. By “regular”, I mean that information is posted on the school website as soon as possible and not “regular” as in once in three months or even more. This I think is a basic demand of any communication between schools and their stake holders. If Singapore schools are serious about Community and Parents in Support of Schools (COMPASS), then they should make greater effort to communicate about what is happening with the confines of a school. If possible I would like to see daily updates.

Some of you (who may be teachers or principals) out there, may think that daily updates is just too much and impossible. But it can be done. However, for this to happen certain things must change in the mind set of those in schools. The first is a paradigm shift in the minds of those in power in schools. They must be willing to allow their staff to post notices on their own. It means that the website is not the prerogative of one or two people or worse, an external website designer. School principals in Singapore are reluctant to do this because of a fear mentality. They have this fear that someone in their staff will post something silly and the school will have to do some damage control. This fear of damage control means that everything posted to the public has to be vetted by the “powers-that-be”.

This fear of mistakes and need for damage control also stems from the siege mentality that schools have as compared to other government departments in Singapore who are more open to public scrutiny. There is almost an unstated rule, that teachers and school principals cannot be criticized in public. They also cannot appear to be fallible. I guess it is part of a “teacher mystique” cultivated in Singapore in order to ensure the high standing that teachers have. It may also come from their own unconscious belief that they are always right and have all the answers. Schools must be willing to allow their staff to make mistakes and not treat such public mistakes as “disaster movies”. The Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore have long introduced the concept of “learning organizations” borrowed from Peter Senge and others. Making mistakes is a part of the learning process, even if it is done in public. Part of the learning for the staff of the school is how to recover from a mistake. Imagine for a moment, a school where its teachers preach to the students that it is alright to make mistakes even in public, and yet cannot accept that from the teachers. That would be either hypocrisy or schizophrenia. Is it also a surprise that students still do not want to look foolish by making mistakes when they can sense that it is not the school culture to value mistakes? These institutionalized mind sets must be removed.

Once schools can overcome this institutionalized attitudes and mind sets, regular daily updates by all staff will no longer be an issue. The technical problems of allowing everyone to post on the website can be easily overcome. Staff members can be assigned accounts with passwords to access the school website. Sophisticated, yet free and easily available software can be used to design the school websites. Free Content Management Systems (CMS) software like Joomla! are easily available for use and because they are CMS, they can do all that I have suggested. The school can also be less dependent on commercial website designers and take full responsibility for the wesbite’s maintenance.

Once the basic framework of the website is set, all staff can post information relevant to the students online. Parents who used to complain about the “interception” of traditional official communication like letters between the school and them, will not have to worry about it anymore.

Other technical issues like creating automatic email lists and other “new” communication media like Twitter are easily overcome. They can be done easily once the main obstacle to the creation of a communicative school website is removed or replaced. That obstacle is in the minds of those who run a school. It is no longer a technical issue.

Recently, a news report described how Singapore’s National Institute of Education (NIE) would be collaborating with some ICT vendors on the development of a multi-million platofrm for learning. This, together with FutureSchools@Singapore, are visible examples of the Singapore government’s commitment to harnessing the power of ICT for education. They are further add-ons to the government’s MasterPlan for IT in Education (MPITE). All these initiatives have put Singapore on the map for ICT in education. However, I think all these should be contrasted with some of the experiences I have had with schools in Singapore.

For example, my experience last night with my son’s school was very educational with regards to ICT use in schools. The school had called for a meeting with parents to discuss the students’ progress in their preparation for the GCE O levels. During the course of the meeting, a parent expressed concern about not receiving official communication from the school which was supposed to be handed to the the parents through the students. I noticed the principal was avoiding my gaze at him and I suspected that he realized that I had actually strongly proposed to him some months ago that all official communication be placed on the school website and that the school uses emails to communicate with parents, as after all email lists are easy to create. I was of the view that there should be different avenues of communicating with parents and that school websites can be used to put up with very current notices in addition to email lists. The school had replied that they would be taking up my suggestion to create email lists of the parents of the students. Obviously from last night’s event, that has not been done.

I suspect that this is probably true of many schools in Singapore. It is not shocking if you find that schools in Singapore hardly use these “new” forms of communication with their stake holders. It seems that with the millions already spent on ICT in schools, a paradigm shift still needs to take place in Singapore schools.

Of course there are pockets of more enlightened ICT uses in schools in Singapore. The NIE plan mentioned above and the FutureSchools@Singapore initiative, talks about using virtual environments which costs millions of dollars. One wonders how successful these big money ventures are going to be when there is little done to work on the minds of the people who are supposed to use these “innovations”. How much thought is given to these ICT projects ability to be consumed by the teachers and students out there in the other schools in SIngapore? Are these projects easy to replicate elsewhere? Or are they just the play things of a few researchers, ICT vendors and teachers of a few schools?

While the research may benefit what we know about how ICT is used for education, shouldn’t one also be concerned especially whether they can be easily replicated? Is it realistic to test drive such expensive platforms if in order to duplicate them, it will cost millions more which are not likely to be readily available? While agreeing that we should not expect all schools to be at the same level of ICT use, shouldn’t the Ministry of Education (MOE) seriously look at how much of the ICT infrastructure that has been given to schools is used adequately and consistent with the changes happening outside the school environment before pushing for more exotic ICT hardware use? I am aware that MOE has always claimed that hardware is not the goal but just the means, of its iCT plans. However, in practice it does not seem to be consistent with what MOE is saying.

Students today, and perhaps even parents today, are using more than just emails. Among others, they use, text messaging both on phones and on the Net, Twitter, blogs and social platforms like Facebook to communicate. yet schools have not even got past the adequate use of even emails. How do schools then propose to lead the wave of change in the way their students are going to do their work in the 21st century workplace when they have not even mastered the use of emails? Yet we see millions spent on virtual reality environments which promise much, but may not be cost effective or even easy to replicate for effective use in an educational environment like schools.