The importance of ICT in education

Living in this highly modernised and globalised era of time, changes happen at the blink of an eye and it comes so fast and rapid that it leaves man, who lacks adaptibility and a drive for life-long learning, outdated. According to MOE's <21st century comptencies and desired students' outcomes> plan, teachers have the responsibility to teach, mould and position our students to be a self-directed learner who is aware of himself and the outside world, has critical and inventive thinking, and is a concerned and active contributor in the society. ICT-enabled teaching experiences is actually in line with MOE's "21st century competencies and desired students' outcomes" plan --- as said in the video and articles, meaningful ICT-enabled experiences actually allows for collaborative knowledge construction, it takes learning beyond the classroom, it encourages students to cultivate self-discipline and take ownership of their learning, and it motivates thinking and independent learning.

Besides making teaching and learning a fun and interesting process, the usage of ICT in teaching actually helps students, who maybe visual learners, to be able to better understand some concepts through visualising pictorial images. I agree that the concept of instilling ICT into teaching is not to be considered the simple process of teaching IT skills to students. It is more a process, whereby teachers guide students, through the usage of IT products, to cultivate in them a spirit and love for independent life-long learning, to let student's take charge of their own learning progress, and to allow thinking and learning to go beyond the classrooms.

It is definitely true that in this globalised world and highly competitive era of human development stage, that adaptibility and the drive and passion for continuous learning and self-growth, is the only way that will allow an individual to retain his competitiveness in this society. Learning cannot, and should not, be constrained to schools and classrooms. Our students must be able to continue learning, even after they graduate, not just in knowledge content wise, but also to learn, to better understand themselves and the workings of the world, to see their place in the societies they live in, to understand their comparative advantages and how to survival in this hobbesian war, and most important of all, is to learn and grow, to be a happy and better man.