Smart school model is considered

Under the plan on developing and utilizing IT in education & training in 2016-2020 released by the HCMC Education & Training Department, schools and classes will go digital, while the enrollment will be online. 

General schools in HCMC will begin speeding up the application of IT in education. In 2018-2020, five high schools, Le Hong Phong, Tran Dai Nghia, Le Quy Don, Nguyen Hien and Nguyen Du, will use the smart school model.

Under the plan, a smart education regulatory center would be set up at the education department to manage education and training activities in the city. The center is considered the ‘brain’ of the model where utilities will be digitalized for management agencies, schools and people to access and use.

Huynh Thanh Phu, headmaster of Nguyen Du High School, said he was still awaiting guidance from the education department to implement the model. However, the concept ‘smart school’ is easy to understand: schools regulated by IT solutions.

A senior official of the HCMC education department said that IT solutions have been applied at general schools over many years, step by step. Students, for example, use electronic student cards, parents receive information about their learning records online, while teachers work with electronic lesson plans. 

However, once the plan is officially implemented, the IT application will be carried out in a more systematic and methodical way.

One of the noteworthy solutions mentioned in the plan is the creation of online public service classes, providing IT apps to users to contact schools via internet. Parents, for example, can enroll their children in schools via the services.

The senior official went on to say that management agencies, parents and schools will be free from heavy work.

At present, the enrollment process is complicated with many procedures required, from application form delivery, registration to checking and approval. Education forums every summer are full of complaints from parents who say they have to stay off work to register their children.

An IT expert said the plan is ‘technologically ambitious’, commenting that it would be not easy to apply IT solutions in current conditions of weak IT infrastructure, substandard IT skills of teachers and poor facilities at schools.

“The problem is that the workers with good IT skills don’t want to work in the education sector,” he said.

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Mai Lan