Maroc - NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - Hier 05:58

Strategic digital drive for education

EDUCATION Minister Dr Michael Dowlath announced on September 11 that the government will upgrade the wireless connectivity of 580 schools in TT. The initiative is likely to be a preemptive measure to ensure that after the 18,000 laptops promised to form-one students are distributed this term, school networks aren’t suddenly swamped. Between 2010 and 2015, the UNC government distributed an estimated 95,000 laptops throughout the school system. The programme was abruptly cancelled by the incoming PNM government in 2015, though former education minister Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly would soon call on the private sector to help address shortfalls in equipment and connectivity availability revealed through needs-assessments after learning was moved abruptly from schools to homes during the covid19 pandemic. That challenging situation immersed households, teaching institutions, teachers and the Education Ministry in a maelstrom of digitally networked classroom and protocols. The management and revised education strategies devised during those difficult years, were largely discarded after schools reopened. What we are left with today is a dog's breakfast of the digital solutions bolted hastily onto the school system during covid lockdowns. There has never been any formal assessment of what worked and what did not, how systems might be adapted to improve learning or even any formal document from the Education Ministry evaluating the forced experiment. The deployment of technology in education and the capacity of schools to make use of it in the classroom varies widely from school to school, sometimes from teacher to teacher in the same school. Learning from the past is what allows us to make higher-level mistakes in the future and Dr Dowlath should be mindful that the 2010-2015 school laptop distribution crashed hard on the reality of systems and preparation. Digital infrastructure is difficult enough to deploy, but it becomes magnitudes of order less effective when it is deployed with inadequate planning, shaky support systems and teachers unable to take advantage of the technology given to their students. There are multiple local, university-level studies of that programme implemented with academic rigor, seeking to understand what happened then and how it might have been addressed that are available to the ministry's technocrats for study. Giving children laptops to use in the classroom and for study should be the last step in a strategy that begins with curriculum adaptation, teacher education, stakeholder endorsement and infrastructure support. Computers aren't books, and the students using them will need monitoring, guidance and support. Where will these children turn when their overwrought teachers and confused parents don't have the answers? Yes, by all means, open the digital bandwidth for schools, but also plan to upgrade the Education Ministry's support and strategic bandwidth to lead this distribution to a better place. The post Strategic digital drive for education appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.