THE ROLE OF ICT IN EDUCATION SECTOR

By: Saverinus Kaka, S.Pd.

Nowadays the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), especially internet in the education sector plays an important role, especially in the process of empowering the technology into the educational activities. Education sector can be the most effective sector to anticipate and eliminate the negative impact of ICT. Technology (internet) in another side can be the most effective way to increase the student’s knowledge.

Being aware of the significant role of ICT (internet) in our life, especially in the educational activities, education authorities should be wise enough in implementing the strategies to empower ICT in supporting the teaching and learning process in the classroom. ICT is not just the bloom of the educational activities, but also it will be the secondary option to improve the effective and meaningful educational process.

The main purpose of the Strategy for Information and Communication Technology Implementation in Education is to provide the prospects and trends of integrating information and communication technology (ICT) into the general educational activities.

There are some unavoidable facts in the modern education; First, the ICT has been developing very rapidly nowadays. Therefore, in order to balance it, the whole educational system should be reformed and ICT should be integrated into educational activities.

Second, the influence of ICT, especially internet (open source tool) cannot be ignored in our student’s lives. So, the learning activities should be reoriented and reformulated, from the manual source centered to the open source ones. In this case the widely use of internet access has been an unavoidable policy that should be anticipated by schools authorities.

Third, the presence of multimedia games and online games by internet has been another serious problem that should be wisely handled by the educational institutions. The students cannot be exterminated from this case. They can have and do with it wherever and whenever they want. Schools, as a matter of fact, do not have enough power and time to prevent or stop it after school times. Meanwhile, most parents do not have enough times to accompany and control their children. So, the students have large opportunities to do with multimedia games or online games or browsing the negative and porn sites. Having been addicted, the students will have too little time to study, and even do not want to attend classes.

In such situation, education institutions play an important role to eradicate these problems. One of which is by facilitating the students to do edutainment or educational games. Schools can let their students be familiar with educational games adjusted by their teachers. Besides, they can also support and facilitate their students to have their own blogs in the internet. A lot of WebBlog providers are free to the users, such as WordPress. In their blogs, the students can create and write something, like an article, poem, news, short stories, features, or they can also express their opinion by an online forum provided in the internet. They are able to share experiences throughout their blogs to others from all over the world. I think it will be an interesting activity for them, and it will lessen their time to visit the negative or porn sites existed.

By doing so, I think our young generation will get more and more information and knowledge by browsing in the internet. They can also create innovation in web design that it may be out of the formal curriculum content, but it will be useful for their future.

Fourth, the implementation of ICT in education has not been a priority trend of educational reform and the state paid little attention to it. Therefore, there should be an active participation, initiative and good will of the schools and the government institutions to enhance ICT implementation at school.

Fifth, the teachers should be the main motivator and initiator of the ICT implementation at schools. The teachers should be aware of the social change in their teaching activities. They should be the agent of change from the classical method into the modern one. They must also be the part of the global change in learning and teaching modification.

The followings are the aim and objectives of ICT implementation in education:

1. To implement the principle of life-long learning / education.

2. to increase a variety of educational services and medium / method.

3. to promote equal opportunities to obtain education and information.

4. to develop a system of collecting and disseminating educational information.

5. to promote technology literacy of all citizens, especially for students.

6. to develop distance education with national contents.

7. to promote the culture of learning at school (development of learning skills, expansion of optional education, open source of education, etc.)

8. to support schools in sharing experience and information with others.

@ This article has already been published in Inside Magazine Vol. 02 Juli 2008, The writer is the Headmaster of SMA Tarsisius II and the director of Sandlewood International English Course.