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ICT Implementation in Education

ISRAEL

Israel is unique terms of ICT implementation, as it is one of the only countries to be doted with a "Science and Technology" division within the education ministry long before ICT integration became a major educational objective. This service was originally created to steer the young nation towards industrial autonomy back in the sixties but has, since the late seventies/early eighties, taken over the responsibility of ICT integration in primary, secondary and university education. This accounts for the long-standing partnership that exists between education and business/industry, which represents a major source of expertise and financing in setting up the high technology infrastructure required for successful ICT integration. It also led to the development of a flexible secondary school curriculum broadly infused with technology, which has today somewhat facilitated ICT implementation 1.
 
Philosophy underlying ICT implementation strategies
The focus of learning has shifted from the acquisition of knowledge to the development of students' ability to acquire and process knowledge, to draw conclusions from that knowledge and to produce the original thoughts, ideas and capabilities that will be indispensable in the new world. In particular, ICT implementation should aim at:

• Equipping students with skills and knowledge in the fields of information and communication technologies
• Making use of ICT to provide students access to the best of the world's cultural assets
• Bringing to students a rich learning environment that will allow them to search for and retrieve information through different media, to organise it and to independently build their own knowledge base.

 
National ICT implementation is for the most part financed by the Ministry of Education, municipal authorities and the National Lottery. A first "five-year" plan launched in 1994, was aimed at and succeeded in computerising approximately half of Israel's educational institutions. Evaluation and research accompanied all stages of the project's implementation. The information gathered and the research analysis from the first plan formed the basis for constructing the second stage2. Upon the recommendations made on these findings, the new plan focuses on developing:

• new curricula in all subjects, with the assistance of the best academic and pedagogical resources
• adapted curricula for teacher training and in-service training for teachers
• new evaluation methods. As learning in the ICT environment is mostly "portfolio style", the main method for evaluating students is assessment of the learning process. This method is being comparatively tested in certain schools by conducting two study-skill assessments at a one-year interval - the first before the school joined the computerisation programme and ICT was introduced, and the second after implementation. The second test results are then compared to the teacher's evaluation of the student's portfolio. Results from this comparative study are not yet available.
• a technological infrastructure suitable for providing various systems of educational services via broadband communications based on existing communication infrastructures and futuristic technologies: shortly all schools in Israel will have access to three communication networks - local (inter-school LAN or Intranet), regional and national.
   
  Further to these objectives, the Ministry of Education recently issued a bid for supplying Internet services to school. The service supplier has to provide all schools with the communication tools necessary for e-learning: forums, e-workgroups and synchronous learning activities.