Basseterre, St. Kitts, March 21, 2014 (SKNIS): The collaborative effort between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Information Technology to modernise learning has paid off with its establishment of the Education Network (EduNET) which will completely revolutionise teaching and learning.
The system, which was set up in all secondary schools in the Federation, will also aid in teacher appraisal and providing different students with different avenues to learning.
Minister of Education the Hon. Nigel Carty stated that technology is critically important to education, particularly modern day education.
“I believe that the challenges we face in our classrooms with students and the challenges we face with teachers as well, requires that we use all the resources reasonably available to us to conquer these challenges,” stated Minister Carty.
Minister Carty further stated children come to school with a variety of learning styles and patterns and interests and both Ministries found it necessary to use advanced technology to reach students with varying interests and abilities.
“So we started with the One-2-One laptop project where we distributed laptops to our students and teachers in High schools,” the Education Minister mentioned. “That in itself is not enough, it’s a good start but we need to talk about the kinds of applications which are going to help us optimize the use of the resources. For example we are talking about using expert teachers in mathematics at one school to perhaps give lessons on special topics that may be of a special problem to students throughout the entire Federation.”
The Minister of Education noted that EduNET allows all secondary schools to interact with each other so that teachers and students can communicate in real time audio-visually.
“You can hear, you can see. That is what we want to do,” he stated. “We could have a teacher at one school in St. Kitts and another school in Nevis discuss and have two classes side by side interacting, sharing ideas, collaborating on projects, these are the kinds of things we envisage.
The establishment of EduNET was part of the Government’s strategic plan to utilize technology to improve teaching and learning.