Chapter 2

1. Express your views on the Jordan Education Initiative and think about its benefits and disadvantages from your perspective.

Benefits:
(i) The initiative is a model of public/private partnerships. Its success results in a win-win situation for the private sector, government, civil society and, most importantly, the citizens of Jordan.
(ii) The initiative can maximize the re-usability of resources in both public and private partnerships. This facilitates the sharing of good practices in curriculum and pedagogical changes and the establishment of networks of stakeholders.
(iii) The overlapping of the resources produced by public and private sectors may be minimized.

Disadvantages:
(i) Private sectors need to survive commercially. Therefore profitability, instead of catering for the education need, would be put in the first place in the private sectors.
(ii) Once there is no further funding or support from the government, the project may be terminated at once.

2. Can Hong Kong learn anything from this initiative?

In Hong Kong, the HKEdCity is providing a similar public/private partnership as mentioned in the Initiative. By comparing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the two partnership, the HKEdCity can work better and further strengthen its role as an agent for offering rich learning resources and education content, and facilitating learning communities
As the curriculum in Hong Kong is still exam-oriented, it may hinder the development of integrating ICT into education. The e-curriculum from the Initiative can provide a good example for Hong Kong to look at and learn.


3. From your experience how can ICT best be taught in Professional Development sessions at schools?

Learn from colleagues: Teachers can attend workshops held by EMB. Those with more experience in integrating ICT can share their experience in schools. The sharing and collaboration among teachers can enable teachers to explore and apply the use of ICT in classroom.

Learn from industry: Teachers should make use of wide variety of resources in the HKedCity as well as publishers, and learn from them.

Learn form learners: Teachers should reflect on their use of ICT through continuous evaluation of students' performance. The feedback can help teachers improve and fine tune the way of teaching so that students gain the most from employing ICT in teaching and learning.

To ease the workload of teachers, more online training for teachers can be developed. This can offer greater flexibility in training scheduling and cater for individual learning differences among teachers.

Besides learning from others, action is more important. If one learns something and practise it, this means one really learns something. To implement ICT more effectively, actions speak louder than words. Without actions, one would not have chance to reflect on one's way of doing things. They even would not know how to get more insights to make a breakthrough when facing the challenge of integrating ICT in teaching and learning.