Think the implication first

What is the implication of my research for Indonesia context?

Resources:

I can talk about the resources (e.g. the computers and Internet). I can tell that for Indonesian people, Australian school is regarded as well-resourced. For Australian, Ann's classroom would be regarded as lack of resources (narrow class, old computers, no ICT support), but this would be regarded by most Indonesian teacher as well-resourced. Jack's classroom is rich for Australian standard.

What can we learn from Australian context? What can we draw from learning the two cases in my research?

The resources is not the key in achieving the rich mathematical learning. The computers and Internet are only tools. How to use the tools for learning is determined by the teachers. In Ann's school, every classroom have 4 computers but most of the teachers did not use it for mathematics teaching. Jack also did not use it effectively. The finding suggests that Jack's familiarity to the Internet in his daily activity is not enough to use the Internet to enrich his mathematical learning.

In current situation of Indonesia, some teachers admitted that Internet is very useful for them. I might say that it could be similar in the situation of Ann 10 years ago, when the Internet was very rare. Many Indonesian people promote the importance of the Internet for schools, even complaining about the limit of the computers. More funding are spend for the infrastructure. Despite the potential of the Internet, this finding should tell us, that providing the infrastructure, providing the Internet connection to each school and classroom does not automatically mean that improving the quality of the teaching. More importantly, that we need to invest money in teaching, in how to use the technology into rich pedagogycal manners.

Types of PD:

The PD is not enough to teach teachers how to use email, to make blog, or browsing using google. The case of Jack show us that being competent to use the Internet does not mean, being competent to use the Internet in teaching. Connect to the research about PD for using the Internet (e.g. constructivist, maths tangram)

The potential communication and collaboration of the Internet.

The case of Ann shows us the benefits of the Internet as a means of communication and as a tool for collaboration. As a result, she regarded the Internet as a professional forum for her, where she can share her ideas, and learning from other teachers.

For Indonesian context, this potential should be optimised. For willing teachers, the Internet could be a powerful site for learning. My personal experiences and other teacher cases (e.g. PM, AH), found that the Internet sometimes is the only solution to get resources. Lack books at school and the bookshop led teacher to see the Internet as the places where they can find something useful. Their difficulties in finding resources or teaching ideas resulted in asking questions to other teachers via email, mailing list, or blog. During this research, I have been involving in several online teachers community, forming a community for mathematics teachers, providing some resources through blog. From this experiences, I found that many teachers shows their keen to learn, to improve their teaching, to get some teaching ideas. This suggest that we need a structured system in catering this kind of needs. (See the idea of the teacher network, the math forum, QSA). Tell them, we have some people providing ideas in voluntary bases, that they certainly can answer it in their spare time.