Today was a parents curriculum talk in D&P’s school. As their principal is fond of saying “this is a neighbourhood school, but not a neighbourhood school” To those who have no clue what I am talking about – neighbourhood schools refer to schools which are not nationally recognised schools – schools where the average child goes to. To that extent this is true – D&P’s school is none of those – they go to a regular school in the western part of Singapore, where most of the children come from within a 1 km radius. Most of the children are normal middle-class children. But a big difference is that this school is also part of the Future Schools of Singapore.

Future Schools@Singapore is a project by the Ministry of Education and the Infocomm Development Authority to build a more IT-savvy nation.  This will be done by having a small group of schools to lead the way in providing possible models for the seamless and pervasive integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) that include interactive and digital media (IDM) into the curriculum for engaged learning in schools.

D&P’s school – Beacon Primary is the first new primary school for the project. This is a new school – D&P’s cohort is the third cohort and the school just welcomed their fourth cohort last week. Once I heard about the school and the fact that it was literally on our doorstep, I was determined to get D&P in – I was a Parent Volunteer at the school for 2 years (that’s for another post). So far, I am liking what I see. This year, the school plans to take the MOE standard curriculum a bit further and enhance learning. Well we’ll see how that comes about.

I’ll leave you with a small anecdote. The P4s in the school have started using their own personal laptops. I did see some students with it last week and this was confirmed by D last week. She came to me and we had this conversation:

D: Mom, do you know that when I get to P4, I’ll have my very own computer

Me: Wow! That’s fantastic! You’ll be able to do so much with it.

D: Yes….I can use my own computer to play any games whenever I want….

Me: <Zapped>

We do not allow D&P unsupervised time on the laptop, which is also password secured so that they can’t use it without permission also not go to websites they are not allowed to .