By Jermaine Ng and Zhang Jiao

THE school environment of the future in Singapore will marry high-tech with smart learning. And a slew of creative and interactive projects in the past 12 months offer sneek previews. Headlining recent initiatives is one called FutureSchools@Singapore, an initiative by the Ministry of Education (MOE) and Infocomm Development Authority (IDA).

Flagged off last May, this programme currently involves six schools: Hwa Chong Institution, Crescent Girls' School, Canberra Primary School, Beacon Primary School, Jurong Secondary School, and the upcoming School of Science and Technology. These schools serve as test beds for innovative education technologies.

For instance, through a learning platform dubbed i-Connect@Crescent which was developed by a group of companies headed by Hewlett-Packard (HP) Singapore, Crescent Girls' School students can work on essays using a WriteToLearn programme, which allows for real-time feedback. Lessons are recorded and uploaded to an online sharing portal, allowing students to learn at their own pace.

Students at another 'future school', Jurong Secondary, get to improve their language skills by honing them through their school's new high-tech production studio, which features soundproof walls and high-definition cameras.

Canberra Primary School has employed touch-screen whiteboards and tablet PCs in their classrooms, which students can use to solve puzzles in spelling and science exercises. The school has also harnessed blogging in English lessons to encourage creativity in writing. On this platform, students can learn from each other's grammar and other linguistic mistakes, and improve their command of the language.

Future Schools - which has an $80 million kitty funded by the IDA, the National Research Foundation and private firms - is slated to run until 2012. Up to 15 schools are expected to take part.

Another initiative, BackPack.NET, was started six years ago by Microsoft, IDA and MOE with the aim of changing the way a student experiences learning through the use of innovative tablet PC-based learning applications.

With the tablet PC-based learning applications, students in primary schools (usually without keyboard skills) can write and illustrate stories, create a storyboard which they narrate and record, and then share their work with classmates. Students from schools like River Valley High School and Crescent Girls' School were part of the pilot trials.

This initiative has been taken to a new level this year. A new programme dubbed BackPackLive! offers support for local software companies in their product development and also rewards teachers for their innovative teaching methods, among various initiatives.

In September, a derelict cow shed in Dairy Farm Nature Park was transformed into Singapore's first high-tech learning forest laboratory for schools, called Wallace Environment Learning Laboratory (WELL).

Jointly set up by Raffles Girls' School (RGS) and National Parks Board (NParks), this lab is equipped with an audio-visual library and research apparatus such as digital microscopes, which students can use to capture images and video clips for their presentations. They can also use field study tools like quadrats, which are rectangular enclosures for monitoring biological samples in the field. An online portal for students to share resources and data collected is currently being developed. Also in the pipeline: the use of social networking media like Facebook and Tumblr to facilitate discussions among students.

Now open to 21 other partner schools, WELL will be accessible to all schools in Singapore by next May.

Apple's slick flick-and-touch mobile phone and MP3 player interface has also permeated Singapore's schools. Mobile developer Omnitoons has rolled out a digital comic version of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream that can be read on the iPhone and iPod touch.

Elchemi Education is working with school teachers on ways to use the iPod touch in teaching various subjects and during school excursions, as well as running programmes that teach students how to develop their own iPod touch applications.

This article was first published in The Business Times.