Jenny Collins, head of a 132 year old school talked about personal stories and the history of her school. Her school has an environmental management group consisting of students, staff, parents, and local experts from universities. She mentioned the Oaktree Foundation: “the Oaktree Foundation is an aid and development organisation run by volunteers under the age of 26. We’re young people working together to end global poverty. We believe that education is the most powerful force we have to change the world. Oaktree takes action by partnering with developing communities to make educational opportunities a reality.”

Ronald Stones OBE followed with an inspirational description of his Green School project. Green school designed by an artist, with no walls, no straight lines, and everything made from bamboo. All classes plant, tend and harvest rice. The emphasis is on social as well as ecological sustainability. Green School has opened Green Camp for other schools to experience the many nonconventional learning experiences. Our grade 7s will begoing to Bali soon; perhaps it’s time for a change in venue.

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I followed John McBryde with Daryl Forde talking about what makes a real international school, as opposed to the many new upstart international schools. Daryl cautioned everyone to think long and hard before applying for international status. According to Daryl, a most important thing is relationships; and also according to Daryl the two Sampoerna schools have the best relationships of any school in Indonesia. His comparison may not be entirely fair as these schools are 100% free, boarding establishments. Daryl’s session was very well received.

Greg De Rosa and Susan Winderlich then described the 21st century classroom, comparing features of traditional and modern education. It was a good general presentatioin, but there was little new stuff for me, until they talked briefly about personal experiences, ie. giving children longterm partners, and also their buddy system where older kids mentor younger ones.

So far the Forum has talked mostly about IT and internationalism. But since I come from a technologically advanced school, most of the tech talk was a matter of preaching to the converted in my case. That part of the Forum on internationalizing schools was what I had come for, and the Panel Discussion so ably moderated by Ibu Harumdah, was worth the price of admission. One aspect that was not covered was marketing, specifically the impact on enrolment of becoming an international school.

My final session for the day, Keith Goatman on data management, was also an outstanding value for me, because we are presently in the market for a school MIS. And it sounds like Keith’s product will do everything we need. And hopefully, with the double discounts for ANPS members and for accredited schools we might be able to afford it.

At the same time Kathy Derrick from IBO Singapore flew in for a one-day post-authorization checkup to see how we were dealing with the host of recommendations from the authorization team. Recall that just last February we received PYP authorization. Kathy was surprised at the extent of progress we had made in timetabling, English language teaching, library organization, etc. We had moved decisively to dismantle our computer lab so that computers are available in the classrooms. We had also moved and consolidated our libraries. So the basic infrastructure is there, we need to add manipulatives in all classrooms, books in the library and remove the wall in the library.

Kathy was very impressed with the huge changes she saw in our PYP implementation at SBR. She saw for herself during the classroom visit that our students have more enjoyment in doing the unit of inquiry, since everyone in school has come to a new understanding that Unit of Inquiry (UOI) is more than a subject. It is a unit to be inquired through different skills of each single subject specific. It causes enjoyment as well to teachers, to get a deeper understanding about planning the unit of inquiry, which can be integrated authentically, so that students can have more learning experiences in their inquiry learning and the enduring understanding of the transdisciplinary theme.

International mindedness which is shown by the attributes of the learner profile is also developed by teachers and students as a daily practices to become a lifestyle of the learning community in SBR. Students are encouraged to make connections to the profile with their actions.

Kathy in her infectious encouraging way complimented all the PYP staff. Next time you visit Kathy we’ll cook a turkey, but you’ll have to bring the cranberry sauce from Singapore, as it isn’t usually available in Jakarta.

The results of my recent online student survey indicate that we are still e-babies in grade 3, growing into e-mature students by grade 10. In this survey, the lowest response rate was 67.4% (29 out of 45 grade 3 students) and the highest was 97.9% (47 out of 48 grade 4 students). Their responses to the question, do you use computers only during ICT time or with other subjects? Please select any other subjects that you have used computer in show a clear gradation at every level from grade 3 to SMA. Note that PE, which was included in the survey for SD, was not part of the SMP/SMA surveys.

Grade 3 students are only using computers for language arts and UOI at this point in time.

Grade 4 has already started using computers for Indonesian and religion.

Grade 5 students are using their own laptops for Indonesian, language arts, math, religion and UOI.

Grade 6 are using their laptops for ethics, Indonesian, language arts, math, religion, science ansd social studies.

SMP students use laptops for all subjects, except art.

SMA students use their laptops for all subjects, including art.

It is far better, in my opinion, to present the whole lesson up front so that those kids who have no problems can proceed at their own pace and in their own way. And for those who have completed the days activities, rather than sitting there checking and rechecking their work, how about some exciting educational game or followon enrichment activity? It is also feasible to use those kids who have finished the tasks for the day to assist the slowerkids, a sort of peer mentoring.

Returning to my initial objective, assessing the impact of technology on teaching and learning, we see three aspects, namely technology integration, changed teaching practices and learner achievement that should be measured. However, despite the general acceptance that ICT impacts positively on learner achievement, hard data in support of this belief are still limited.
A grade 4 ICT class using school laptops.

To get a handle on initial deployment of our laptops in grades 3 and 4, I put together a simple survey with questions like:
What is your favorite class at school?
What is your least favorite class?
What subjects are you learning the most in?
Do you use computers only during ICT time or with other subjects?

The final question was the key one, the others were filler. The questionnaire was produced in Survey Monkey, a free online polling service. The link to the questionnaire was emailed to grades 3 to 5, and as responses started to roll in, it was decided to extend the survey through grades 6 to 10. The results are clearcut with regard to computer deployment, showing increasing usage of computers across subjects from SD to SMP and SMA. Two examples are shown. Grade 4 is using computers in UOI, language arts, Indonesian and, to a limited extent, religion. The SMP, on the other hand, is using computers in all subjects but art. The SMA, by the way, is using computer in all subjects, including art.

Several questions are obvious. For instance, why isn’t grade 4 using computers for math? And why is art the last subject to get integrated when there is so much great art stuff on the web? I believe that these survey results will lead to improvements in our teaching/learning.

Grade 4 response to the question, do you use computers only during ICT time or with other subjects? Please select any other subjects that you have used computer in.

SMP’s response to the same question.

All parents know that drinking and driving is dangerous, and most would not model such behaviour for their children. They may not realize that studies indicate that using a handphone while driving is at least as dangerous as driving when legally drunk. According to an article, Cell phones make drivers as bad as drunks, motorists on the phone don’t realize what’s going on around them.

A recent survey found that nearly 60% of teens text while driving, which is quite frightening. We must teach kids that this form of risk-taking is potentially deadly. This is really easy to teach…by example. Drivers can teach their passengers by making a show of turning off their cell phones.

I wonder if any of our risk-taking students are fully aware of the dangers of riding in a car while the driver is using his handphone. And how many have the courage to tell their driver or their parents to turn their handphones off when driving. HAVE A RISK-FREE HOLIDAY

Cheating on Indonesian exams has even become the butt of jokes. The Uncyclopedia lists under Indonesian Student Code of Conduct: “honor corruption by cheating on all tests, even if you actually know the answers.” And in a long list of characteristics of Indonesians, “You know you’re Indonesian when…
Your whole class has cheated on an exam, and gotten away with it.
You have spent the night before an exam looking for someone who sells the questions.”

But what does Pak Nurbianto mean? That kids should stop cheating, or that their teachers and other educators shouldn’t be involved. We could give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he meant both. and then ask the question, ‘How will this impact on the morality of the younger generation?’ Everybody seems to assume that progress can or should only be made in the young generation. But the young generation learns from the older generation, so do we have one of those impossible-to-solve chicken – egg situations here? I don’t think so, but it will require dedicated, honest adults and ‘clean’ schools working together.

Role modeling is very important when it comes to teaching kids honesty. However, it is pointless to stress the importance of honesty with children, if they live with parents who lie about their whereabouts, steal from their employers, cheat on their taxes, or bribe policemen. Unfortunately, these examples may only be the tip of the iceberg of dishonest behavior.

Psychological studies on the development of lying and cheating behavior in young children clearly indicate that most preschoolers as young as three years of age will cheat if they think they can get away with it, and then lie about or deny their cheating. If admonished to be honest, a significant proportion exhibit honest behavior. In a study of age relation, 78% of first graders, 45% of third gradwes and 31% of fifth graders cheated in an experiment. The majority then lied to conceal their transgression, and their ability to maintain their lies increased with age, In all of these studies cheating is doing something that they were told not to do, such as peeking at a card or playing with a specific toy. Interestingly, both children and adults view these lies very negatively, more negatively than the misdeads themselves. (Talwar et al. Lying in elementary school years: verbal deception and its relation to second-order belief understanding, Develop. Psych. 43 (3) 804, 2007; Talwar et al. Social and cognitive correlates of children’s lying behavior.

In these psychological studies of children the violation is not severe, for obvious ethical reasons. Children’s behavior might change if the stakes were high or if the consequences of transgression were more serious. For instance if the consequence of being caught cheating on an exam was an automatic failure, as is the case in many national plus schools,

On a different note, if newspapers hope to retain their dwindling readerships in this era of intense competition with the internet, they must begin to provide more scholarly editorializing. The complexity of the topic of honesty in schools was hardly touched in this article, Should we turn a blind eye to dishonesty in schools. For example, it is perhaps interesting to view cheating in Indonesian schools in perspective of, for instance cheating in American universities, a topic which has been well studied. McCabe et al in Cheating in Academic Institutions: A Decade of Research (Ethics & Behavior 11(3) 219-232, 2001 ) claim a prevalence of 75% in 1963 to 82% in 1993 for serious cheating Thus, the problem is not limited to Indonesia, and foreign reports should be checked for their relevance to the Indonesian scenario. McCabe and Trevino concluded that “ the strong influence of peer’s behavior may suggest that academic dishonesty not only is learned from observing the behavior of peers, but that peers’ behavior provides a kind of normative support of cheatimg. The fact that others are cheating may also suggest thst, in such a climate, the non-cheater feels left at a disadvantage. Thus cheating may come to be viewed as an acceptable way of getting and staying ahead.” Does this not sound familiar? The same article discusses ways of managing cheating in the classroom, including “clearly communicating expectations regarding cheating behavior, establishing policies regading appropriate conduct, and encouraging students to abide by those policies.”.

In a very recent national survey, technology was implicated in exam cheating in the U.S. More than 1/3 of teenagers with cellphones admitted to cheating at least once with them, and two-thirds of all teens say that others in their school cheat with cellphones. This serious issue is not fully recognized by parents, since seventy-six percent of parents think cellphones ae used for cheating in their child’s school, but only 3% of them say that their child has ever cheated with cellphones. Clearly, the problem of cheating on exams is not limited to any one country and it clearly needs action.