By Amelia Tan

SALVADOR (BRAZIL): St Andrew's Junior College (SAJC) principal Lee Bee Yann is in illustrious company as an adviser to Microsoft's US$500 million (S$700 million) education initiative, Partners In Learning (PiL).

She is the only school principal and Singaporean in the 14-member International Advisory Council (IAC), which is mostly made up of university professors and government officials.

She was appointed last year and is serving her second one-year term.

Mrs Lee, 50, and other members of the council - who include University of Toronto Professor Emeritus Michael Fullan and Australian Council for Educational Leaders chief executive officer Jenny Lewis - are in Brazil this week for Microsoft's Innovative Education Forum.

Council members provide Microsoft with input from current research and educational trends to help it chart the direction of its PiL programmes. These aim to improve the standards of education in countries all over the world by increasing access to technology and training.

Mrs Lee got in with this crowd by virtue of her bold move in 2004, when she was principal of Crescent Girls' School, to provide a whole cohort of 360 Secondary 1 students with a tablet computer each.

Under her leadership - Mrs Lee headed CGS for nine years until she joined SAJC last year - Crescent Girls' became the first Singapore school to have an entire cohort of students which learnt purely through computers.

The Secondary 1 cohort of 2004 used the computers they were given throughout their four years of school. Instead of lugging textbooks to school and handing in worksheets, the girls learnt from materials uploaded on the school's Intranet network.

Learning continued outside the classroom, through Live Messenging and document sharing programmes.

The results were outstanding. The girls, who graduated in 2007, scored an average of 9.4 points in their O levels, the best results in the school's history.

Her actions impressed Microsoft, said PiL director James Bernard.

'She was able to lead her school through change... It shows an additional level of passion to education and commitment to new ways of thinking, those are the things that clearly stood out,' said Mr Bernard.

The soft-spoken Mrs Lee credited her teachers, who ensured that the students had all the online resources they needed to stretch themselves.

'The one-to-one computing programme offered personalised learning to suit their individual needs. This allowed the students to become self-directed and independent learners,'she added.

The mother of two boys, aged 15 and 21 years, said that as a school leader she is able to provide 'ground-up feel' on whether PiL programmes will work.

She also taps on her previous experience as a researcher in the Ministry of Education to test the effectiveness of innovative teaching and learning practices. Microsoft uses results from her research in its PiL programmes.

A strong supporter of the use of technology in education, Mrs Lee said teachers must start by going back to the basics of teaching and learning before they introduce technology into the classroom.

'I am an educator. I value character education a lot, teaching and learning, understanding the pedagogies involved and looking at how we can apply theories looking at the way students learn and fitting our teaching to suit them. All these pieces must be in place before innovation which is sustainable can come about,' she said.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.