Overall development direction
With the policy promotion and investment of resources by the SAR government over the years, in terms of education informationisation, the information technology infrastructure equipment and the use of information technology in the classroom have become popular. In addition, the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) indicated that Macao students will surely use digital tools to deal with the unpredictable challenges in their daily life.
As the change in political, economic and social situation has become more and more rapidly, there are more and more problems needed to be solved, new knowledge is created rapidly to address the problems and it is updated more and more quickly. A large pool of talents equipped with good coordination skill, creativity and innovation is needed to handle the situation. Therefore, on the basis of the above-mentioned achievements, schools should consider taking one step further to support the enhancement of students’ comprehensive competence by using education informatisation, including increasing students’ abilities to acquire knowledge, solve problems, innovate and build teams, etc. The following approaches can be considered:
1. As an interdisciplinary teaching approach, STEM/STEAM/STREAM can help students learn to acquire knowledge on their own through conducting researches to understand new questions, come up with solutions to questions and use technologies, particularly information technology, to put the solutions into practice by themselves, so that their creativity and innovative abilities can be developed.
2. It is believed that using interactive digital teaching materials in classroom can highly improve students' motivation and engagement in learning, thereby creating conditions for extensively cultivating talents with innovation and creativity skills.
3. Informatisation of education creates conditions for personalised learning for each student; through the use of big data, teachers can conduct an instant analysis, provide feedback and make adjustments immediately so that the effectiveness of teaching approaches of “teaching students according to their aptitude” and “personalised learning” can be achieved gradually.
To this end, with the support of school-based teaching researches and teaching plans, schools should equip with appropriate resources and information technology infrastructure as well as sum up experience from similar projects to set up their own information technology education plans.
