Distinguished Guests, Principals, Teachers, Ladies and Gentlemen, Good morning.

It is my pleasure to be here this morning at the Opening of iTopia 2002, a conference, an exhibition and Learn@School which will showcase IT opportunities, innovations and achievements in education.

iTopia marks the end of the first phase of our journey towards the effective use of information technology to enrich teaching and learning in every Singapore school.

When we launched our first Masterplan for IT in Education in 1997, we were amongst the few countries in the world to embark on a national plan for IT in education, extending to every school. In a sense, we were among the pathfinders.

The underlying philosophy of the first Masterplan was that education should continually anticipate the future needs of society and work towards fulfilling those needs.

We cannot tell the shape of things to come in the world of the future. But we do know that it will be a vastly more competitive future, and a more uncertain one. We also know that we have left the industrial age and have entered a new, innovation-driven economic era.

Our most important priority as a nation is to gear up to this future of frequent and unpredicable change, and innovation-driven growth. It requires rethinking, refocusing and adjustments, in our economy and society. One of the key adjustments underway is in the way we educate our young, so as to develop in them a willingness to keep learning, and an ability to experiment, innovate and take risks. It is an evolutionary adjustment, not requiring radical upheaval, but it is the most important change we have to make for the long term. Our ability to create and innovate will be Singapore�s most important asset in future.

There is no single solution to developing a spirit of creativity and innovation. What students learn will remain important. But how they learn will be even more important.

Through adjustments in teaching and learning in our schools, we want to nurture future generations of Singaporeans who can think actively, and who can explore and create. We want them to learn by drawing on multiple disciplines. They must also be able to learn through experimentation, and through collaboration.

IT is one of the key enablers in achieving these changes in the way students learn.

We are now coming to the end of the journey we began in 1997, a journey that all of you contributed to and helped navigate. Personally, I find it particularly gratifying to be here today as I had the privilege of being closely involved in formulating and implementing the Masterplan in its early days, when I was a civil servant at MOE .

The first Masterplan ends in 2002. We still have a long way to go but it is an appropriate time to reflect on what we have accomplished, and to set our priorities for the next phase.

According to the 2002 Information Society Index, Singapore, together with 13 other countries, belongs to the Skaters category, a group of countries in a strong position to take full advantage of the information revolution because of advanced information, computer, Internet and social infrastructures. More directly related to education, in the Global Competitiveness Report 2001-2002, we were ranked 2^nd in the world, after Finland, for the availability of Internet access in schools.

However, the most important achievements have not been in the technology infrastructure, but in teaching and learning processes. In a relatively short time, we have created an IT-enriched learning environment for all our pupils. Most importantly, we have nurtured a teaching force that is able and keen to explore the opportunities that technology offers.

Our achievements are modest when compared against what we aim to reach. But they have been significant enough to have interested a steady stream of overseas visitors to Singapore, wanting to learn more about our Masterplan and exchange experiences. In the last six months for example, about 30 schools have been involved in hosting such visits.

iTopia is a festival of creativity in the use of information technology in education. It is an island-wide event, involving all schools because each and every school has played an important role in this journey. Each and every school has achievements to reflect on, and future innovations in IT to look forward to.

The impact of the first Masterplan is evident in the way pupil�s have made use of technology to open up new boundaries of learning; in the professional growth of our teachers; in the development of a supportive school IT culture; and in the enhanced relationship between schools and the community.

Our key mission when we went on this journey was to use IT to enhance the learning experiences of our pupils, and to equip them with vital skills.

Annual evaluations conducted by MOE have consistently revealed that pupils find that IT makes learning more interesting. In the last such evaluation exercise in Sept 2001, 90% of pupils felt that IT had made their lessons more interesting. The vast majority also felt that the use of IT had increased their knowledge (82%), had improved their learning (over 77%), and that it had encouraged them to learn beyond the curriculum (77%). Each of these perceived benefits were most pronounced at the primary school level.

IT has allowed for greater interaction among pupils. Over two thirds of teachers (68%) pointed out that the use of IT as a teaching tool had encouraged more active pupil participation in class. And almost two thirds (64%) of pupils felt that IT in the classroom had stimulated more discussion with their classmates.

Creativity has been evident in our pupils project work, as well as in the products they create for various IT-based competitions. In a digital microscope competition held in 2001, a group of pupils shaped a visual poem - an artistic presentation of a series of images captured by the digital microscope. They were applying a tool normally used in the sciences in the field of the arts.

At the international level, our pupils have performed well in IT-based activities. Outside the US, Singapore had the largest number of finalists and award winners in the 2000 ThinkQuest, a competition in which pupils from different countries collaboratively design educational websites.

If our ultimate focus is on our pupils, our teachers are the key to the effective use of IT to enhance pupils� learning. Teacher training was the centrepiece of the first Masterplan, with every teacher in every school receiving the core of 30-50 hours of training in use of IT in teaching over the course of a year. On a national scale, this is exceptional by international comparisons - exceeding that in Israel, Finland and Norway, who have also placed importance on training.

Our teachers have shown that they are keen to learn and widen their repertoire of skills, as indicated by the increasing attendance at IT-based workshops. In the Sept 2001 evaluation of the Masterplan, 84% of teachers expressed interest in further training in the use of IT to enhance the teaching process. This is in my view the single most important indicator of success of the first Masterplan. The vast majority of teachers find preparing IT-based lessons to be worthwhile (65%), and want to explore more ways of integrating IT into their teaching (77%).

More teachers and Heads of Department are also volunteering to share their ideas and experiences with their peers. At iTopia itself, 50 Principals, teachers and even pupils will be sharing what their experiences during the conference while 75 schools, including institutions of higher learning, will be sharing during the Learn@Schools programme.

If we hope to nurture creativity in our pupils, our teachers must themselves engage in creative activity of one form or another. Technology gives teachers the opportunity to explore, innovate and create. Since 1999, a total of 380 Singapore teachers have participated in the Hewlett Packard Innovation in IT (HP INIT) Award. They have shown great enthusiasm in wanting to create their own IT-based learning resources, and to try more learner-centred approaches. Teachers in three schools are also involved in the edu.QUEST:Singapore-Apple Collaboration Project, where they are engaged in action learning and experiments with wireless and media-rich technologies.

We have seen the development of a supportive school IT culture, one that encourages teachers to explore new uses of technology, and which encourages the sharing of knowledge and experiences. Many schools have institutionalised time for sharing during routine staff meetings.

IT has also been effectively harnessed to support a wide range of school processes, besides teaching and learning - in administration, counselling, communication, and even community involvement programmes. Technology has, in other words, become a pervasive feauture of the school, just as it is in many other industries and professions.

With the help of IT, we have brought the larger community and world into schools, and expanded the horizons of learning. Our pupils have been engaging in collaborative projects with their counterparts in other countries; industry experts and academics are involved in making learning meaningful and relevant to the real-world; parents are roped in as partners; and pupils learn vicariously from virtual museums and field trips.

Using telecommunications tools ranging from email to videoconferencing, Singapore pupils have been collaborating with pupils elsewhere to solve problems, exchange ideas, or even to create something new. In a recent example, pupils at Peiying Primary and New Haw Junior School in the UK pupils came up with ideas to package and send by air fragile food items to each other, such as love letters (the Chinese New Year favourite) and meringue nests.

We have worked with industry partners to explore new technologies, create new IT-based learning resources and provide pedagogy-based training for our teachers. We have also collaborated with public bodies, including Ministry of the Environment, museums, and even the zoo to create authentic and varied learning projects for our pupils.

Beyond using IT to extend learning boundaries, schools are using IT to forge bonds of community, bonds that will matter greatly as Singapore moves ahead economically. For example, pupils at one of our schools used the Internet to raise funds for a charity organisation. They also provided support and advice to other pupils who wrote in to an online counselling forum. A primary school teacher gave her time and effort to train a group of teachers from the APSN schools (Association for Persons with Special Needs) in digital art.

On the surface, IT has nothing to do with affective development. All it takes is imagination.

The first Masterplan has given us a strong and broad base - a basic technology infrastructure, a starter pack of content and learning resources, a fair level of IT competency amongst teachers and general support of the use of IT in education. These are meaningful achievements. However, there is a lot more we can do.

Our second Masterplan for IT in Education, or mp2 for short, will consolidate and build on the achievements of the current Masterplan. We need to sustain the momentum gathered and make better use of technology to stimulate thinking and creative endeavour among out pupils.

• Today, teachers use IT mainly to support a given, existing curriculum. Going forward, we will design the curriculum itself to take account of the new teaching methods that are made possible by technology. We will seek to integrate IT into the design of a more flexible and dynamic curriculum.
• Today, the predominant pedagogy shaping the use of IT is teacher-centred. As we move into the future, we will evolve a more pupil-centred strategy for learning.
• Today, we have a one size fits all approach to technology resources, with most schools receiving the same complement of IT provisions. Tomorrow, schools will have greater autonomy and flexibility in the use of funds for IT.

To achieve these objectives, we will focus on 6 key areas in the next phase of our journey.

The first key area: getting pupils to use IT for active learning. The use of IT in learning has to move beyond accessing and processing knowledge, to stimulating pupils to think and experiment, independently and creatively. These are fundamental learning objectives for an innovation-based era. The use of IT will have to be more closely integrated in our strategies to achieve these objectives, through the formal and informal curriculum.

To do so, we will incorporate the potential use of IT into the planning, design and delivery of the curriculum itself. Teachers and pupils can look forward to a rich and comprehensive repository of digital media content, besides existing materials like textbooks and web-based resources . MOE will drive the development of digital content in partnership with private sector electronic publishers. Teachers will be able to use such content flexibly within the curriculum framework. They can customise their teaching, for example, by switching the sequence within which different topics are taught, or varying the amount of materials that different groups of pupils need to reinforce their understanding.

The second key area: using IT to enhance the connections between the curriculum, instruction, and assessment methods. We will explore the use of recently developed IT tools to increase the efficiency of summative assessments, and to expand the scope and nature of formative assessments - for example to be able to test a pupil�s reasoning skills, besides whether he provides a correct answer. We will study how this can be done while preserving the integrity of assessments. Teachers can look to IT reducing their marking workload.

The third key area: to enable teachers to use IT effectively for professional and personal growth. Teachers will be able to look forward to a sustained model for staff development in the use of IT in education, with clear benchmarks for the beginning teacher, the trained classroom teacher, the peer leader and the organisational leader - benchmarks that they can work towards. They can also look forward to the streamlining and integration of existing and new training initiatives into a single e-learning system.

The fourth key area: giving schools greater capacity and autonomy in the use of IT for school improvement. The Educational Technology Division will continue to work closely with schools to help them make the most effective use of IT to support their learning and administrative programmes. Schools can look forward to more autonomy in the management of IT-related resources, clear performance indicators that will help them to self-evaluate their IT programmes and the support of IT Consultancy teams in each school cluster. Expanded autonomy is not just a matter of optimising on finances. With more freedom for schools to experiment and to customise their IT strategies, we hope to see a greater diversity of creative approaches and processes.

The fifth key area: to develop an active research programme in IT in education. We are no longer followers in the game of education. There is a need for an expanded, ongoing national and school based R & D programme to improve the next generation of technology applications for teaching and learning. Teachers can look forward to R & D grants to help them experiment with novel teaching strategies and to develop new teaching and learning resources. The Educational Technology Division will work closely with NIE to conduct research in the use of IT in education.

Singapore must also develop close linkages with leading agencies and school districts abroad, in the US and Europe for example, in the field of IT in education, and seek ways to collaborate with them in research and school practice. We will develop this external wing under mp2.

The sixth key area: to provide a dependable and flexible infrastructure that promotes widespread and effective use of multimedia resources. We will provide schools with a multi-purpose, multi-functional and pervasive IT-enriched environment. But our focus must remain clear - it must be about livening and opening up the learning process for pupils, not about playing catch-up games with technology.

The second IT Masterplan adopts a systemic approach, integrating all the key pieces � curriculum, assessment, instruction, professional development and the culture of the school. MOE will continue to work closely with schools, industry partners, institutions of higher learning and other bodies to help school leaders and teachers to push the boundaries of learning for their pupils.

Our goal is ultimately not about the use of technology, but about changing the culture of the classroom and school to support and motivate thinking and independent learning among our pupils. The culture of the Singapore classroom is no longer static. Teachers are changing and learning. IT will be of benefit in schools if it helps to keep this process of change going.

I hope that you will take this opportunity offered by iTopia to learn from your fellow educationists and from the renowned speakers who are here to share ideas and perspectives, and discuss the exciting possibilities that are opening up in education.

It is now my pleasure to declare iTopia 2002 � open.