Pengetua, guru besar ikuti K3PS


SAEMAH BT. MAT SAHIR


CYBERJAYA: The Multimedia Development Corp (MDeC) is helping the Education Ministry to upgrade 50 rural and underserved schools into smart schools.
MDeC, which is custodian of the MSC Malaysia initiative, said upgrading work will be done in three phases beginning with 15 schools this year, 15 more next year and 20 in 2011. Its senior manager of smart schools, Dr Norrizan Razali, said the 50 schools located nationwide will be modelled after the country’s pioneer 88 smart schools.
MDeC will use a different approach to upgrade the rural schools to smart schools, Norrizan said.
“It will be a whole different challenge upgrading these 50 schools,” Norrizan told In.Tech in an interview recently. Unlike the first batch of smart schools, most of the rural schools are not high performing schools but she believes that ICT (information and communications technology) can help broaden the minds and improve the grades of students there.
“These schools don’t have the same kind of access to information like the first batch,” Norrizan said.
The task in the rural schools is to uplift the human capital in those schools and conduct leadership programmes to help teachers provide the benefits of ICT to their students.
“The main challenge here is in change management so we plan to sit down with the teachers and principals of the schools to enlighten them on smart schools, as well as how these will help improve the teaching and learning process,” said Norrizan.
She said MDeC and the Education Ministry will also take an inventory of the components that will need to be installed in the would-be smart schools.
MDeC and the ministry will also help the teaching faculty in each of the rural schools to optimise the ICT facilities given to them and will ensure that proper technical support is in place. “By the end of this project, MDeC also hopes to have a model to transform more rural schools into smart schools,” Norrizan said.
The upgrading of these schools, she said, gives MDeC a chance to get a hands-on approach to developing smart schools in Malaysia. Norrizan said that since the first 88 schools were transformed into smart schools between 2006 and 2008, there are now about 1,737 new smart schools in the country. “Most of them are not ranked as five-star smart schools because to get to that level, a school must use the IT facilities provided to innovate their teaching methods and I’m not talking about (just having) Powerpoint presentations,” she said.
She said the Education Ministry will help the lower-ranked smart schools improve on their IT usage so that they will eventually become five-star smart schools.
MDeC and the ministry continue to supervise the first 88 smart schools so that they can further improve themselves, Norizzan said.
Smart schools is one of the main thrusts of the Ninth Malaysia Plan, which was announced in 2005.
According to the plan, the Government is promoting the utilisation of ICT in schools to enhance the quality of education in the country.
High performance schools join together the very best of today's design strategies and building technologies, as well as:
Also, high performance schools are cost-effective and help to protect the environment.
In 2003, the California Department of Education estimated 35,000 new classrooms or 7,000 classrooms per year (19 per day) are needed to accommodate the projected number of unhoused K-12 students in the state. Over the next five years, $5.2 billion per year in school funding will be needed to design and construct nearly 300 schools annually in California. As school expenses rise, it becomes even more important to find new ways to minimize cost. High performance schools are an innovative and cost-effective alternative in controlling operation and maintenance expenses.
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Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS)
Organized in 2000, the Collaborative for High Performance Schools is a collaborative of government agencies, utilities, and nonprofits that are working to improve the quality of California's schools. CHPS is developing standards for the design and construction of high performance schools. As a part of the collaborative's activities, CHPS stakeholders provide funding to assist in the implementation of high performance features.
CHPS offers a Best Practices Manual to assist architects, engineers, and school administrators in designing and building schools that offer an enhanced learning environment for children. CHPS Volume III, Criteria, provides a checklist for schools to self-certify that they have achieved "high performance" status. For information on school district's that are using the CHPS guidelines, visit the CHPS website.