MACAU: THE SCHOOL OF ST. PAUL PIONEERING THE USE OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIELD OF EDUCATION

Saint Paul School (Escola São Paulo) is a diocesan school run by the Dominican Fathers and one of the leading schools in Macau imparting education to a population of nearly three thousand students.

After considering many ways to improve the education level of the school, the Administration of St. Paul’s School, under the direction of Fr. Alejandro Salcedo OP (Director), in coordination with Fr. Jose Angel L. Legido, OP (Administrator) Fr. Athanasius Cheng OP (Director of the Pastoral Care Department), the ICT Department, the Curriculum Department, and the different school workteams, has decided to implement the “Classroom 2012 Project” in a way that is considered pioneer in Asia and even in Europe.

The project will make heavy and comprehensive use of proven information technologies and is designed to cater for and adapt to the need of all the teachers and students, as well as to improve the interaction in between teachers, students and parents, thus taking the basic principle of the school’s education policy, ESOS, short for Empowering Students for an Open School, to a new level.

Basically, the school is building an integrated computerized system that will allow parents to monitor in real time the activities and progress of their children, teachers to share and prepare their lessons from a wealth of online resources, students to review their lessons from home as if they were at the school and submit their work or questions to their teachers from the Internet.

Students will not be using “traditional” text books any more, and each will be provided with a “tablet pc” where the curriculum for each school year will be downloaded, so that the curriculum can include rich content like power point presentations, videos, etc. that can help the students understand the subject better. Apart from this, each teacher can also include other relevant material, as well as homework, automatically. Teachers will also be able to poll their students in real time to test how a particular lesson has been understood by the students.

Classroom 2012 Project will be implemented from September 2012 on a pilot basis that will include one class from Primary 4, Form 1 and Form 4, on two subjects: Mathematics and English. After the pilot, the project will be reviewed by the Education Department of Macau’s University of Science and Technology to see comparative results with the rest of “traditional” students, and to pinpoint any shortcomings of the system that need to be solved. In September 2013, the project will be implemented for all classrooms of Primary 4, Form 1 and Form 4 on all subjects and in September 2014 the project will be implemented in the whole school.

The scope and the design of the system has been very favorably considered by worldwide information technology companies like Microsoft, Cisco, etc, as well as education entities like the Education Department of Macau’s Government and the education faculties of several universities in Macau. All of them will support the project to make sure it is a success. (JALL)