Book Chapters

I still remember back in 2010, I stood before my colleagues in school and asked, ‘What if I promised each of you a teacher assistant to support you in class?’ In the midst of the subsequent excited buzz, I asked them how such an assistant would help. The answer were variously ‘Help create teaching resources’ or ‘Provide more individual attention to weaker students’ and, as expected: ‘Help with the marking’. At my next suggestion, ‘What if I promised for every child in your class, there will be a teacher assistant’, their excitement turned into scepticism. Of course, as my colleagues surmised, I could not hire so much human resource. Instead, my offer was to support using technology, arming each child with a mobile learning device. The school’s vision then was to harness the use of technology to enable greater affective, cognitive, and behavioural engagement in class through collaborative activities, timely feedback, and metacognitive reflection (Tay, 2017). Of course, 10 years ago, we were only thinking of support in terms of online resources course, 10 years ago, we were only thinking of support in terms of online resources (such as apps and platforms). Artificial Intelligence (AI) was hardly in the picture. Imagine how much more excited colleagues would have been then with the possibilities that we have now through AI.