2016 WITSA Global ICT Excellence AwardsNomination Form

AWARD CATEGORIES:Awards will be given to individuals, academics, businesses, NGOs, government branches etc., on the basis of particular programs, web sites, strategies of ICT / Internet deployment; i.e. the awards will not be political but technical, honoring use and implementation of technology in accordance with the criteria described below (i.e. a government per se will not be a “winner”, but one of its integrated web sites or services may be). The winners may not necessarily represent the most advanced technology solutions, but should be excellent examples of ICT deployment which have made a difference for the community of interest (whether providing public services, boosting profits or advancing connectivity):

Please note that nominees will be judged on the basis of the following criteria and weighting:

Judging Criteria Weighting

Global Impact/Potential 40%

Market Potential 20%

Innovative Features and Functionalities 20%

Feasibility of Implementation 20%

3. DIGITAL OPPORTUNITY AWARD – NOMINEE 2

YOUR NOMINEE(S): SELTAS by The SAME Network

REASONS FOR NOMINATION (please justify why you think your candidate is qualified):

SELTAS, a Life Long Learning Platform for Special Needs People, is a barrier free personalized learning and educational platform with open digital content. SELTAS helps us take maximum advantage of information technologies and the resources from digital world to make ecological changes in the Special Needs World.

SELTAS provides a key for the people with special needs and their stakeholders to access resources data and on-site evidences, which show their personal growth and development timelines from childhood to adult among educational, behavioral and social areas. It is a unique e-platform with ecological changing value in the 21st century for the people with Special Needs.

SELTAS is organized and developed by The SAME Network for Quality Education (“The SAME Network”). It is a professional community of schools with a mission to raise education standards and living quality of people with special education needs.

The SAME Network was set up in 2006 by a joint university-school project between the Centre for Advancement in Inclusive and Special Education (CAiSE) in the University of Hong Kong and public schools on curriculum development. The focus of the Project was to raise standards of teaching and learning by developing a curriculum approach that would give students from special schools access to the mainstream curriculum, which is in line with the “One Curriculum for All” principle proposed by the Curriculum Development Institute of Hong Kong Education Bureau in 2001 curriculum reform documents. Since then the focus has moved from curriculum development to education standards and living quality of people with special needs.

In the SAME Network, B.T.C.F.S. Yeung Yat Lam Memorial School is the host to start up the SELTAS platform as an e-learning platform with learning resources, learning evidences and online resources shortcut for students and adults with special needs.

The main attraction of the SELTAS platform is its mainstream approach to curriculum and living orientation. The adherence to the mainstream approach not only gives people with special needs the same learning and living opportunities as their peers but also aligns schools and special needs service center on the same mainstream approach, so that good lesson and activity planning experiences and practices can be shared across institutions and so are the electronic resources. And this is the key to ‘open the door’ of professional collaboration.

Another important feature of the SELTAS system is its sensitivity to learning and cognitive diversity. For each of the Key learning Area (“KLA”), there is an attainment scale from Level A1 to A12 for teachers and support adults to identify the level of performance of their users in each learning strand and plan activities accordingly. Together with the versatility of e-learning practices learning can be made much more child-centered and child-led.

For schooling, SELTAS provides teachers, students and parents a key to access resources data and evidences of learning. Teachers can reach the database and resource base for planning and implementing lessons; students can access to their work and learning resources in classes and

outside the school; parents can understand their children’s learning progress by on-site evidences provided and communication with teachers by various medium of communication.

As a lifelong personalized companion for people with special needs, SELTAS not only provides education tools and resources, but a channel to access online information and social networks. With various customized sign-in methods, people with special needs, who are vision impaired users, hearing impaired persons, physically disabled person, people with mental disabilities and cerebral palsy, are able to make connections with the world and find what they need to satisfy their living by SELTAS, so as to break down the barriers built by own shortcomings and to build up their own preference profiles on this one-stop portal easily.

Reasons for nomination

Global Impact

Nowadays most learning solutions are conceived as mere e-learning platforms rather than as lifelong education profile and living tools to enhance both education and living quality. Most of formal education is done face to face and it is supplemented individually at home by each student, fostering the existence and promotion of relations among the community. This has been a key aspect in the development of SELTAS, which accommodates the many styles of teaching, learning and collaboration existing today.

Under the barriers of physical, psychological and intellectual disabilities, people with special needs are having less learning opportunities and life experiences than the people in the mainstream education and living. As a knowledge-based economy and society, SELTAS aims to cater people’s individual needs, continue education at different stages of life, so as to build an education system conducive to lifelong learning and the all-round development of every individual. As a result, everyone can have equal learning opportunity, no matter what extend of disabilities.

SELTAS believes “Knowledge changes fate, study create the future.” We aims to provide the special community with a set of systems which focus on their needs in teaching and learning, building up self-preference profile, maintaining communication with others, providing various kinds of online materials and flexible ways to access to the world web in living. With the high-quality but low-cost system, the developing countries can share the benefits with the developed

countries by free registration, which help save the expenses for developing a lifelong informational, educational and communicational platform. It may bring them investments and sponsors by sharing their information and data, therefore, bring them a better future.

Moreover, SELTAS offers a motivating social and self-directed learning environment adapted to technical and cultural reality of the people with special needs; an informative platform for teachers to share ideas and content of learning and teaching; free Personal Learning Environments and social content repositories that generating an initiative to facilitate social learning and a storage for learning evidences.

Internet is not only for the developed countries with high standard quality of living, but for everyone who needs it. SELTAS is heading towards to change the ecosystem of the usage of internet, which is not only used to search information and communicate, but also sharing ideas and resources with equal opportunity among the world, by arousing the awareness and recognition of the idea of equality and being a member of the world community, with the vision of a unified world - a world free of nationalities, borders and racism.

Towards the world, SELTAS has already introduced to Malta, India, Britain and Australia, and shared free registration with Institutions and scholars. SELTAS is planning to bring worldwide people with special needs higher education standards and living quality; and to provide a global online lifelong sharing platform for a wide range of citizens of both developing and developed countries to enjoy the benefits of SELTAS.

Market Potential:

A Life Long Learning Platform for People with Special Needs has excellent perspectives for growth. A potential of around 15% of the World Population needs this solution to access the Digital tools and Digital world respectively in low cost. All people with special needs will benefit from the use of the SELTAS e-learning platform, they can register to the platform to growth themselves in the digital world. By using the platform, learning would be much more learner-focused and learner-led. The new paradigm of teaching and learning that the platform facilitates will subsequently raise the quality of teaching, learning and living.

Adults in supporting people with special needs will benefit from the platform at least in two ways, i.e. lesson or activity planning and professional development. The platform can ensure that

electronic resources are adhere to the core subject’s knowledge and lifelong learning categories. The rich e-resources can let supporting adults and people with special needs access the details which can match their learning levels and pace of learning. On the professional development front, the platform provides a forum for the special needs population to share, to exchange, to discuss issues of lifelong learning. Those teachers and supporting adults with duties of writing resources and materials would have the benefits of learning from colleagues in other schools and institutions. In short, the system ensures teachers and supporting adults are constantly renewing and updating themselves professionally by collegial collaboration that facilitated by the platform across the country boundaries.

Parents and Guardians will benefit from the new paradigm of partnership with schools and institutions. From the platform, parents and guardians get instantaneous images and evidences of learning and by blogging with teachers and professionals; parents can be more involved with SENs’ learning process now. Participating schools and institutions will benefit as the platform not only provides schools with an efficient curriculum management system but an effective evaluative system that would guide the schools and institutions on planning for the future.

Universities and Government will also benefit from this partnership with the schools and institutions in using the platform as the experiences and data drawn from such will provides professionals and educators with insights relevant to education program, youth growth program and lifelong planning program. The user’s learning and behavioral data from the platform provide an important base for future research on user’s performance and/or supporting adults’ attitude and paradigm change.

Indirect Beneficiaries: The SELTAS platform ultimately aims for serving the whole special needs field with special appeal to inclusive education and lifelong learning. All users should benefit as ultimate goal of this platform to practice student-centered learning. Learning should become much more exciting, motivating and inspiring. The platform are using the most common programming and database technology in this early 21st century, SQL database, php web pages are used as the foundation with extension tools in apps basis.

For lifelong learning, we are focusing on “Student-centered learning” approach in the teaching, learning and assessment cycle. Once teachers and supporting adults using the platform, the steps of lesson and activity planning will bring them to the “Student-centered learning” paradigm. Users will change their mindset gradually. For I.T. in education, the platform is linking with the Google for Education services and some publishers’ resources. The focus of using I.T. is to raise the collaboration between students, teachers and stakeholders across schools instantly and to

ensure there is a continuous accumulation and sharing of teaching, learning and assessment resources across the world.

The platform provides different users’ privileges, for examples, guest’s registration, network school’s users with management data feedback and school manager’s registration. The platform had been invited by the Hong Kong Education Bureau to demonstrate and held seminars in 2012, 2013 and 2014 Hong Kong Teaching and Learning Expo. We also had been invited by the Kwan Ching and Tsuen Wan District Subsidies School’s professional development day keynote speeches.

Besides, the platform is recognized by the Hong Kong ICT Award judging panel in 2015 and won the Grand and Gold ICT award in the Inclusion and Community Category. In the same year, SELTAS platform is invited by the Government to compete in the APICTA ICT Competition at Sri Lanka with over 15 countries in the Asia Pacific regions. After an intense competition and judging, SELTAS platform has won a Merit in the Inclusion and Community Category.

Figure: Directions to Market Potential.

The Focus of SELTAS in the first phase is in Hong Kong public schools and adult service’s institutions.

In the second phase, we are expanding the registration of the platform and lifelong learning paradigm shift in China and Asia Pacific.

In the final phase, we like to expand the learner focused and lifelong learning paradigm to the people with Special Needs in the world.

Innovative Features

1. An Innovative and dynamic platform for people with special need

SELTAS platform is the first platform (and probably the first in the world) for Hong Kong people with special needs. It provides supporting adults, users with special needs and parents a platform to access the training process and a community with a well-designed DATABASE that is built on the needs of different parties, shared by all communities in the world.

2. An interactive resource database for all with diverse needs in both special and general needs

Our ultimate product is an e-platform with rich curriculum resource materials for the enhancement of e-learning and the advancement of collegial collaboration of adults for people with diverse needs. In its fully-fleshed version, it should have resource data that support learning of all the key areas in the public. SELTAS Project has been developed by special schools for special school teachers, the range of abilities covered in the schemes of work falls within the levels of primary schools. Besides, the framework and structure of our resource materials are all based on the mainstream curriculum, teachers of general schools with integrators would find our platform and the resource materials relevant and applicable to their training situation.

3. Promoting collegial collaboration through building a professional community

The rapid growth and change in knowledge and information brought about by advanced technology poses a great challenge to supporting adults. The pace and size of change is too much for an individual supporter to catch up with. Working in partnership and collaboration with other colleagues that supporters’ mastery of knowledge and information would keep them abreast of the changing world. SELTAS provides a platform for professional communities to be formed and for collegial collaboration to take place among supporters from across centers.

Functionalities

1. Personalization

SELTAS Platform has designed various methods of login, such as text, NFC connection, reading QR CODE with self-designed apps, it is easy for the people with special needs to define resources for enriching their view and enhancing their knowledge. At the same time, they are able to build up their knowledge with different tools such as generators, cloud-based tools in online learning activities; and to learn on different kind of devices, such as desktop computer, notebook computer, tablets and smart phones.

2. Teaching, Learning and Training with multiple methods

Based on the curriculum of training on the platform, supporting adults can plan their training within the platform, they can access plenty of flexible self-learning media and resources easily.

3. Social Web

By using the SELTAS platform, people with special needs are able to communicate with each other by sharing information, email, instant messenger or personal blog. They get autonomy to add and modify all kinds of content: text, multimedia, evaluations, etc.

4. Deployment - Online / Offline

SELTAS platform can be implemented and achieved through Cloud, Mobile Platform and LOCAL LAN. It can overcome the problem occurring among networks. Tasks can be stored instantly and synchronized when network resumed.

5. Provides Transparency and Dashboard Reporting

SELTAS can generate reports in real-time to view the most up-to-date information such as user’s behavioral study. Institutional management data and learner’s performance indicators can provide valuable data for research and development.

6. Assessments

Parents and supporting adults can read initial, intermediate and final evaluation and get immediate feedback questionnaire. Form of assessment can be set as self-assessment or peer assessment. Results are visualized instantly.

7. Innovative and Gamification digital content

Platform accept different kinds of resources and training evidences to be uploaded as pictures, videos, word documents and pdf, etc. The resources are linking to their works and to widen the

variety of knowledge building. Based on gamification resources, users can experience learning and trainings under a funny and attractive atmosphere.

8. Self-Directed Learning Opportunities

Barrier Free Solutions are provided to break the access obstacles such as using NFC cards, Access Control Apps, QR code scanning and Scanning functions for making selections. Users can use the platform on their own pace and access the resources under the level of their relative ability; they can choose to use the most suitable application for their own while they are learning. Their learning outcomes would be saved and shared with the most suitable format on the platform.

9. Attainment of people with special needs in the schooling age

By using the platform, there is a series of attainment levels for the learning strands of the Key Learning Areas such as Mathematics, Science and Languages. The attainment levels is use to reflect the learning progress and development. There are 12 levels for each scale. The levels cover the early stages of sensori-motor development (A1-A3), the foundation stages (A4-A8) and the early primary school stage (A9-A12).

Level descriptors are written to help adults and teachers to identify students’ levels of attainment within each strand of the KLA. The attainment levels allow the teachers to know and appreciate what each student ‘can do’ and so are defined by their ability and not their disability. They also allow the teacher to see each student on a continuum of learning ability irrespective of their administrative classification of mild, moderate and severe.

For supporting adults and teachers:

User-friendly GUI designed in SELTAS is implemented and equipped for reviewing the progress of the trainees. It has enhanced awareness of introducing e-learning elements in the training and

promoting proactive and interactive training patterns from users with special needs. Furthermore, a culture of professional collaboration among sporting adults from other centers is inculcated. It also enhances professional growth, knowledge and skills in curriculum management of the training area and enriches the process with resources from the internet.

Meanwhile, SELTAS help strengthen the users’ confidence taking greater initiatives in training though they have various needs. We do hope the trainers are well equipped for the challenges and new paradigm of training in the 21st century.

For people with special needs:

More user-centered learning models are likely to emerge users become more active which can let the user easy to access information. Sharing and collaboration among users can be form based on the social network established in SELTAS. They can engage in self-learning out of the time in center with various formats.

For schools/institutions/rehab centers:

Head of schools/institutions/rehab centers can monitor supporting adults more effective. Professional collaboration is enhanced by working with other centers within a community of excellence. The partnership between the centers and between the universities will be enhanced by Professional development and growth of centers (especially supporting adults) by collaboration in research in curriculum resource management.

For Parents and Guardians:

Parent partnership is enhanced through the use of instantaneous communication modes provided by advanced technology.

For Community of Practices across the world:

A circle of excellence emerges from the community through the shared use of the SELTAS platform which becomes a meeting ground for professional sharing and collaboration in the field of education for users with special needs.

Feasibility of implementation

Forewords

As the 21st Century unfolds, learning becomes more interactive with higher popularity and adaptability of mobile devices. Most important is students can learn in a much self-directed and personal way and in coordination with others without any barriers of space and time in the internet.

The appearance of SELTAS make a great change in the mode of lifelong learning by giving chances for the people with special needs to get different learning resources on SELTAS for enrichment of learning in any time and places. After graduated, they can continue to access to the world on the platform, to share knowledge and life experiences with their supporting adults, e.g. teachers, parents and guardians; and to make connections with other in social communication, as well as to foster their learning attitude and habit to be a self-controlled learner.

There will be a further shift towards the mind of the supporting adults from acting as a leading role to a facilitator of learning and resources providers, and then become learning companions with the people with special needs.

Case study

B.T.C.F.S. Yeung Yat Lam Memorial School has started to use the platform with more than ten network schools since the beginning of the establishment of SELTAS. With regular meetings and professional development days among the Network schools, a school-wide network of professional sharing and practice are formed to share trial experiences for further renovation of the platform.

Simultaneously, Centre for Advancement in Special Education (CAiSE) of The University of Hong Kong and the overseas consultant, Mr. Keith Humphreys became the consultants of the platform. They began to start class observations and academic research in order to raise the identification of SELTAS. The schools inside the SAME Network are divided into two practice modes, they are using whole school approach or phase implementation approach.

Implementation Model

The implementation of SELTAS will be carried out in 4 phases:

Phase One: Preparation and Planning Phase

The major tasks for this period include

A. Recruitment of platform Manager (oversee and coordinate the work on the platform by the teaching team and IT team)

B. Invitation of vendors for developing the platform (publishers, universities and non-profitable organization)

C. Form IT team (people from IT system development and Software Company and a system administrator from school mainly for renovate and enrich the web-based platform, testing and file/resources management and technical support)

Phase Two: Set up for SELTAS platform

The major tasks for this period include

A. Selection of teachers for the Teaching Team (selected subject specialist teachers for inputting data to the Learning Applications, building up the e-resource bank, progression grading, produce learning resources according to different levels)

B. Training workshops for teachers

C. Hardware (Desktop computer, WLAN/LAN, WEB BROWSER, generate user account)

D. Users’ Information Literacy (such as the use of equipment, ways to login and use the platform)

Phase Three: Tryout Phase

The major tasks for this period include

A. System Tryout (e.g. tryout the lesson plans, using Learning Application or different communication tools and apps)

B. Training workshops for teachers

Phase Four: Full tryout and implementation of the SELTAS platform

The major tasks for this period include

A. Tryout of SETLAS by schools on all KLAs and Evaluation

B. Final review and release of the platform

C. Promotion to Supporting adults about the platform

Implementing Evaluation

Ways to view the operating condition of SELTAS platform

A. Set up committee(committee include academics in special education, experts in curriculum for special education, ICT specialists, parents and key members of the platform. They need to monitor, supervise and give advice to the process of implementation)

B. Make Questionnaires and doing survey (used at each phase to collect feedback from teachers of implementation schools on the usefulness of the platform and its effects on learning. This may be extended to students and parents.

Conclusion

For the equal opportunity in education and living of People with special needs, SELTAS builds an international special needs community and a life-long learning platform by providing barrier free access and over 10,000 special needs resources for the Special Needs to have personalized learning related to the mainstream curriculum with inclusive objectives. This will probably make an ecological changes of the people with special needs, the 15% of the world population, to access the digital world. Apart from the users, SELTAS caters Teachers, Professionals, Supporting Adults, Parents and Guardians.

Looking forward to worldwide, both developed and developing countries are able to share the resources, data and benefits of SELTAS as it is compatible with Assistive Technology in low

cost. The big data inside the platform is beneficial to research and development by Universities and the Government. Therefore, SELTAS is a worldwide adaptable lifelong platform which provides people with special needs a key to access and integrate to the world for self-development.

SUPPORTING INFORMATION: Please send any supporting information to the address above, including information from candidate (i.e. excerpt from program description, web site print-out, press release, etc.)