Computer Literacy to prepare students for wide and wise use of IT in the school

by Yip Chee Yan (STFA Lee Shau Kee College) May 2000

STFA Lee Shau Kee College started to use the Internet for teaching and learning Computer Literacy in the junior forms in 1997. In the last few years, a Computer Literacy programme was developed to replace the Logo training, hoping that a number of dreams can be turned into reality.

The programme was built around a main theme: turning the students into skillful workers in the Internet environment. All students were trained to be competent in entering text, both Chinese and English contents into their web pages, clipping their own drawings, photos, movies and 3D worlds into it so that the products are not only attractive to others, but also giving a sense of achievement to the students themselves. It was found that many students were so motivated that they started to develop their own projects even without the supervision or requests from the teachers. We hope that all students would be skillful enough to help teachers to build up web based teaching and learning materials for future use.

The programme was designed under a very tight budget: building teaching and learning materials in a very low cost platform. Making use of freewares to develop and browse the materials, students or teachers can build up the same platform at home at very low cost. To the parents, it would also be a good news, as it added no burden to them other than purchasing the computer and connecting it to the Internet. Although the production platform is cheap, the products produced can be really professional, this included the animated web pages, and embed 3D objects and worlds that visitors from all over the world can examine or walk through it in the cyber space. Besides that, file size of the products are relatively small, allowing such products to be retrieved quickly through the Internet even under slow speed connections.

Educationalists would also be interested in the delivery of the programme: the constructivitist's approach in action. Students are now able to explore at their own will to build up their knowledge in their "Microworld" as suggested by Seymour Papert (the creater of the LOGO turtle), and teachers are now able to identify immediately the problem students and approach them directly to give help even in the lessons.