Capacitación y desarrollo

The decision-making for ICT implementation in education is not as simple as building a

reasonable infrastructure and providing required funding for school principals. It is an

operation that involves different cultural, political and educational parties, such as

teachers, students and parents. Hollingsworth (2005) tackled the problem of policies

related to ICT implementation in education and evaluated the expected success of the

July 2004 document from the Education and Manpower Bureau (EMB) of Hong Kong,

Empowering Learning and Teaching with Information Technology. He compared the statements in this policy document to Sweden‟s ICT policy and a report completed by

Peter Kearns for the Australian Government. He argued that, although the Hong Kong

policies were ambitious, they would have many difficulties in achieving their goals.

Hollingsworth reported that Kearns' report had discussed the three phases of ICT

development. In the first phase, the question of the importance and the existence of

computers in schools was addressed. The second phase he had discussed was the

pedagogical implications of ICT, that is, when and how it should be integrated into the

teaching and learning process. The third phase addressed was the complete change in

the role of ICT in schools and the role of school itself as an open institution for society.

This phase discusses the new boundaries of classrooms by making them opened up and

Furthermore, the three important areas of vision and leadership, strategic planning and

foundations were compared with the Hong Kong policy.

According to the goals of Hong Kong policy, the majority of the focus was on the

school heads in establishing their vision and taking leadership and responsibility for all

the activities. In Sweden, municipalities also expected school heads to take leadership

roles in the ICT implementation. However, it stated that, even though the heads were

trained with ICT skills, but was difficult to involve them to the required extent. The

Hong Kong principals faced the same problem, as it was difficult for them to shift into

the new forms of the curriculum and assessments. Research also showed that the

teachers and heads were not clear on the integration of ICT into schools.

The second point was strategic planning, which means the process of connecting

policies and giving progression to policy directions. According to Hong Kong policies,

the IT was embedded into the curriculum guides and interactive learning became a key

task included with set of generic IT skills. In Sweden, the school system was

decentralised and the municipalities took responsibility for the whole sector of

education. However, the Ministry of Education states that the student democracy and

involvement must be taken into account as part of the learning situation. This showed

that the ICT had influenced some of the curriculum restructuring. After the analysis, it

became apparent that the teachers and students were not prepared to take up their new

roles.

The third criterion was a foundation that means that the policies should be directed at

professional development of teachers, infrastructure and online content for the effective

use of ICT in education. It discusses the possibility of teachers sharing experiences with

more knowledge of IT in teaching to learn, as well as encouraging new teaching

approaches. Hong Kong City education was expected to take on many roles in this area,

such as providing effective resource channels, organising various IT related activities,

developing E-learning platforms and online training courses for teachers, building

communities for sharing their experiences and enhancing the resource development. In

this aspect, Sweden has a very liberal approach. They appointed a pedagogic facilitator

who supports the teachers and students in problem based and pupil orientated

development projects. Teachers were supplied with computers for their homes to carry

out this task. This model gives us the importance of ICT in professional development

and planning. After the analysis, some of the negative aspects were seen, such as the

teachers having more workload. In addition, there was the problem of allocation of budget for the teacher substitutes and the internationalisation of Hong Kong City‟s

education.

Hollingsworth concluded in his study that those three criteria are essential for the

successful implementation of the EMB document, however, he pointed out some

difficulties. Vision and leadership has been made the responsibility of the school

principals and other parties have been neglected. Strategic planning still has many

issues that need to be dealt with and it was found that students and teachers were not yet

ready to take on their new roles. In addition, he pointed out that the system is not ready

to change from exam driven to student empowered. Although this document

acknowledges the mistakes of previous documents, it was not supportive in reaching the

third phase of ICT development.

suitable leadership having a clear ICT vision, pedagogical implications of ICT and

integration of ICT into the teaching and learning process (Al-Ramiz, 2009). This study

argued that although the Hong Kong policies were ambitious they encountered many

difficulties in achieving their goals. This will instigate this research to investigate SPE

and other educational policies in Kuwaitdeeply to find out to what extent those policies