Sekolah Bogor Raya

by David Booth

I was one of two Sekolah Bogor Raya staff (Mr Gerald was the other) lucky enough to attend a conference called Learning in a Digital World which was held at Jakarta International School 7-9 November.

The conference was a good place to get ideas for enhancing digital learning at SBR, for finding out what we could do better, and how we could do those things better. Watch this space for regular updates on our progress over the coming months.

However, it was nice to find out that in some ways SBR is ahead of the pack in certain areas. Our decision to require SMP and SMA students to bring laptops to school starting in the next academic year was perhaps a controversial one. Many international schools with much larger IT budgets followed a different route – one very popular with parents – in that the schools bought large numbers of laptops which students could use when required. These same schools are now coming to the conclusion that their approach was wrong. They are presently agonizing over whether to persuade the school management to buy enough laptops so that every student gets one, or to persuade parents to supply the laptop to the student.

When students use their own laptops, they take care of them. If something doesn’t work they get it fixed quickly because the laptop is an important part of their personal world and not just a stationery item that is used to do certain types of schoolwork. If SBR students can’t connect to their social networking service at the start of the school day they ask a friend to help and if that doesn’t work they go to see our IT department to work out the problem. Their counterparts at some excellent international schools would only find out that the laptop issued to them didn’t work at the start of the lesson, and during the time taken to sort out the problem they would already have missed a significant part of the lesson.

Indeed, the consensus at the meeting was that the ‘Starbucks’ approach to digital learning was the most efficient. The clients bring their laptops, the business supplies broadband wireless internet. Keeping it simple like that is the way to go. Of course that means that reliable wireless broadband access is an absolute essential and NOT a luxury. It is as important a service to 21st century schools as electric lights or running water in the restroom. As a school we must continually work on improving that service.

Equally interesting was the lack of progress made by some of the most IT savvy international schools in the region in supplying another essential service: mains electricity supplies for student laptops. It would seem that SBR is the leader of the pack here. Our cheap and simple system for safely connecting desks together in SMP was the envy of teachers I spoke to from schools whose fees and IT budgets are many times those of SBR. I don’t want to embarrass anyone at JIS as they provided fantastic facilities and amazing hospitality for the conference, but when you see 20 laptop-toting teachers in a classroom with four power sockets it brings home the importance of the problem. At least those teachers will now have better insight into the student experience, and they may have ideas better than ours to improve access to mains power.

Photo thanks to Mike Jenkins at JIS.