The next time you see a student sending a short messaging service (SMS) on the bus or MRT, do not assume he is doing it for fun. He may well be shooting off the latest school assessment.

Impressed with the growing popularity of SMS among primary schoolchildren, Mr Terry Tan, 45, a teacher at Anglo-Chinese School (ACS) Primary, deci-ded to test its viability as an educational tool. And what began as an experiment a few months ago is now a raging success.

'We first used the SMS system to send kids questions during an Amazing Race type game at Fort Canning,' said Mr Tan, who heads the school's gifted education programme.

The children had to go to various 'checkpoints' at Fort Canning to pick up clues which would help them answer the questions sent via SMS.

'This was interactive learning, making optimum use of technology,' he said.

That was just the start. Now the school's pupils routinely complete multiplechoice question-based revision quizzes and worksheets for science, English and social sciences via SMS.

'The kids are comfortable with the technology, teachers get the results quicker, so it is a win-win situation,' said Mr Tan.

About 30 per cent of the upper primary were regu-larly bringing mobile phones to school. An overwhelming majority said they could bring one, if the need arose. And even now, kids who do not have access to a mobile phone can answer quizzes on paper.

Using Visual Basic for Applications, Mr Tan created a simple Excel program that enables a computer to send and receive multiple SMS messages. These were then transmitted from a mobile phone to the computer via infrared technology.

The questions had to be pre-set and answers sent back via SMS were instantly collated and automarked by the system, said Mr Tan.

'Pen and paper quizzes usually take three to four days to mark. The SMS system took seconds,' added Mr Tan.

The system can also create a variety of instant reports, including one that tells teachers which questions the children found hardest to answer.

The school has since engaged IT solutions firm Globitec to further refine the system. Now a SIM card modem developed by the firm allows computers at ACS Primary to send and receive multiple SMS messages.

A simple inexpensive web-based tool has taken much of the tedium out of English, Malay and Mandarin reading classes at Xinmin Secondary School.

In earlier years, language teachers had to listen to recitations by 40 students per class in Secondary Two and Three to grade their oral skills.

But this year, students have been logging onto an Internet portal and submitting audio clips of their reading, with the help of a freeware, known as Dictation Buddy, downloaded from the Internet, said the school's English teacher, Mr Gabriel Tan, 30, who is also the brain behind the project.

'The children can also listen to sample recordings done by teachers on how a particular passage should be read,' said Mr Tan. 'They can also listen to recordings of their classmates to compare how they fare.'

The same website also features a video section comprising instructional clips that children watch and then write about in their essays.

Mr Tan conceded that in the early days, teachers were often mesmerised by new technologies, with-out actually seeing whether the tool would add value to a lesson.

He recalled how his school adopted Net Meeting, the then-new video-conferencing technology from Microsoft to beef up joint work among students in the late '90s.

'The collaboration could be recorded online through Net Meeting,' said Mr Tan. 'So overwhelmed were we that we did not realise that the same collaborative effect could be achieved by just gathering the kids in a single room and making them use pen and paper!'

But the school has come a long way since then.

'Teachers should always think of a lesson's objective and then see how technology can be used to meet that objective,' he added. 'Do it the other way round, and you've got it dead wrong.'