15 September 2017

The Straits Times Schools (ST Schools) recently launched a new education portal called NewsEd, which contains news articles organized into a platform that is designed specifically for teaching and learning.

When ST Schools spoke to educators — as part of the design-thinking approach it adopted for building its new education portal — it found that a significant proportion of teachers already shared news content with their students. However, they faced challenges that prevented them from engaging the students on current affairs more regularly. The ability to access limitless amounts of information also means that curating and pinpointing which resources were most suitable for classroom usage become a chore.

On the portal NewsEd, articles are categorized and tagging, and also equipped with a search function that makes it easier for teachers to locate articles to teach specific lesson objectives. Some articles are pre-loaded with questions to test students, and commenting and quick-marking features in NewsEd then make it seamless for teachers to engage their students.

Schools have begun to use the new portal actively. For example, during Tuesday morning assemblies at Crescent Girls’ School (CGS), students use their personal learning devices such as Windows tablets and smartphones to read about everything from the latest developments in United States-North Korea relations to details on Singapore’s first reserved presidential election via the NewsEd portal.

The school also regularly shares its information and communications technology-related teaching practices with other schools through its professional development network, CrADLe (Crescent Academy for Digital-Age Learning).