The challenges and issues concerning the implementation of the smart school concept
- 1. The challenges and issues concerning the implementation of the Smart School Concept One of the challenges that can be detected is due to lack of facilities thus, mismatch between smart learning and examination will be occur. So, the extension of the smart school concept: Teaching-learning processes should be run. The teaching processes relating to curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and teaching-learning materials. It help students learn effectively and efficiently. It also enable students to self-accessed and self-directed learning. It also cognitively attractive, motivates students to learns and encourage active participation. Moreover, combinations of network-based, teacher based and courseware materials will become more attractive. More importantly, the readiness of teachers and students to adapt with the new concept of learning and teaching also has to be considered. Besides that, lacking of technical staff to supervise network also can be the challenges to implement the smart school concept. So that, ongoing training and retraining teachers is needed. Smart Schools will not prevail with only the infrastructures and students attending them. Teachers, as the all-important agents, will be the ones who will actually translate the transformation theory to transformation reality. For that purpose, it is clearly very important that efforts must be made to develop the knowledge, skills and positive attitude of the teachers in order to ensure the success of the Schools Transformation as a joint effort. The Teachers Education Section, Ministry of Education has been assigned the responsibility to implement Bestari Training in the effort to supply education’s work force which will help achieve the objectives of Smart Schools. To achieve the success of Smart School implementation, professional training not only for teachers, but also for the staff as well should be held. Moreover, it is not a one-off event, but a sustained effort where the teachers get the support of students, colleagues, the ICT administrators and the government (MoE).
- 2. To ensure the implementation and success of these Smart Schools more teachers need to be trained so that all teachers can contribute towards achieving the nation’s educational direction and goals together. The Ministry of Education subsequently set aside RM288 million for the training of teachers specifically for the achievement of the “In cultured schools with Smart Technology” agenda. In line with this development, the responsibility to train teachers has been assigned to the Teachers Education Division in order to ensure that the teachers who undergo this training will become catalysts for the coordination of efforts and success of the national education. Furthermore, the problem of face the breakdown of electricity supply also should be considered. Thus, the authorities should play their roles in improving the management of smart school. For example, Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) has already held the powertron2 electricity generation project to overcome the problem of Sabah’s electricity supply shortage. Moreover, if the staff or teachers face with the problems integrating with existing computer systems. In order to overcome the problem integrating with existing computer system, each school need to have a system integration engineer who has a broad range of of skills including software and hardware engineering, interface protocols and general problem solving skills. When the ideas of introducing this Smart School concept in Malaysia is makes publicized to the public, lots of feedbacks were collected in order to get the opinion of others such as the schools, teachers, students and even the parents itself. There are different opinions collected from the feedbacks and the results actually shows that most of the opinion given out is mainly are not so positive opinions, stating out all the difficulties and also complications that arises from this Smart School concept.
- 3. One of the problems that seem to appear from this smart school concept is given out mainly from the survey towards the school, getting the teachers and students opinion on this smart school concept. They stated that the problem arises is regarding the troubles for them to cope with the use of computer. Coping with the use of the computer in Smart Schools appeared to be the core feature of the change of phenomenon in Smart Schools. As we all know, even though we had been living in the modern era technology, whereby technologies had been worldwide use in this era nowadays, but we must agree to the fact that not all of the people in this world know how to adapt themselves to the use of these technologies such as computer, tablets and any other gadgets. The users of these gadgets are mainly young generations whereby they are more interested towards exploring these new modern like inventions, but usually the older generations are mostly having trouble to adapt themselves to the use of technologies such as computers and many more. To imply this scenario to the Smart School Concept, we can see that the use of computer in Smart Schools appeared to be the main factor that affected both students and especially the teachers. Some of the teachers might not know all the details about the usage of computer before and now they felt themselves having trouble to try to adapt to the use of computers in Smart Schools. The students however, might be having less trouble as they were known to be fast learner and can adapt themselves easily to this kind of new situation. Even though it seems as if this contributes to mainly the cons, but there is actually pros hidden beneath the cons. As we see at the bright side, some of the teachers who had never used a computer before now felt themselves to be more computer literate. One of the teachers described this phenomenon whereby he said “Some teachers, who they have never been taught using the computers, are now able to use it affectively.”
- 4. The one of disadvantages of smart school is about courseware problems. The term “smart school, “ will also create the unnecessary and misplaced sense of superiority or inferiority as the case may be between schools which are fortunate to be wired with the last IT applications and those which are not fortunate as well as between school with different student-computer ratios. Usually the computer at the school were hardly used and computer that has provided to old. Some of the newer courseware provided to the school cannot be used on the older computer, most of which are over six years old. Besides that, sometimes in the class not enough computer and not enough courseware. The sides problems is the students not enough time to use courseware. This is because the students is not expose very well about the courseware. Moreover, there are lack of guidance to use courseware .Beside that, there are lack of technical expertise to maintain the systems. To overcome these problems , we need to replaced and upgraded the computer and provided better coordination between the various agencies involved in the smart school initiative is needed. Besides that, smart school courseware was found to be under-utilized by teachers. This is because some teachers are not keen on using the courseware. They lack ICT knowledge and not comfortable with the use of hardware and courseware. They prefer more traditional way than using technologies. They think that using courseware is a waste of time so they rather pay more attention on parts that are related to exams. The most crucial aspect of training would be teacher training. Teachers will now play the role of a guide on the side, thus doing away with their traditional role of the sage on the stage. There needs to be a careful mix of intensive training and counseling to help teachers adapt to the new environment. This will be critical in order to dispel the natural insecurity and fears of the redundancy that will arise from this radical paradigm shift in teaching methodology and hence
- 5. the very role of teachers. This training will have the devote considerable attention to changing the mindset of teachers to understand that smart schools must provide the best environment for self-paced, self-directed, and self-accessed learning. This would involve thoroughly revamping training programmers, significant additional infrastructure and the mobilization of expertise, both local and foreign. While teachers from the largest target group for training, the challenge to train administrator, supervisor, technologist and supporting staff is not insignificant. Teachers will identify goals, define direction for their students, pilot the progress towards these goals and then step back to allow the students to learn at their own pace. They will give psychological support and encouragement. They will periodically step in to check progress, applaud strengths and efforts, identify weakness and decide what kind of practice their students will need. In short, teachers will be instrumental in creating conditions that will promote self-directed learning which is creative and independent. In the long term, these teachers will need to augment their skills regularly, if they are to stay abreast of developments in their profession and remain confident in their application of the technology.