‘Third World’ School Computer Facilities Must Be Improved
(21 Mar 2008)
In fact the schools in the new EU states have enviable levels of ICT equipment and broadband. TUI estimates that over half of computer facilities in schools are now unusable with funding per student very significantly lagging behind Northern Ireland where approximately €75 million is spent annually on 1,200 schools and where all principals and teachers have laptops for educational use.
The union has put forward four recommendations aimed at provisionally alleviating the shameful neglect of this area.
TUI recommends that:
Each classroom should have at least a laptop and digital projector
Classroom teachers be released to support specific ICT strategy schemes within schools
A laptop computer to be provided to every teacher in the country
The public should desist from collecting exploitative vouchers from supermarket chains for ICT equipment which the Government has failed to fund
Each school should also have a well equipped and state of the art computer room on a quota basis for every certain number of students.
Bernie Judge, TUI Education and Research Officer, TUI said
“With our current economic health as a nation and the importance of ICT in the developing the much vaunted knowledge society, our failure to invest in ICT in our schools is troubling in the extreme.
Teachers and ICT
The State’s commitment to Information Technology in schools has not matched teachers’ commitment to the area. Specifically, teachers and pupils are let down by a lack of up to date, usable equipment. We are concerned that there is an obvious lack of coherent and joined up thinking at Departmental level on ICT. Often, schools are not given the necessary pedagogical and technological supports to allow teachers to effectively integrate ICT across the curriculum and within the school generally.
Provision of a laptop computer to all teachers would be a positive way of engaging with technology and in enabling them to commence integration of ICT in their classroom teaching. Teachers need to be empowered through the availability of ICT together with the requisite professional development and educational content. Regular and effective use of ICT depends on ready and convenient access to computers for lesson planning and subsequent use in the classroom.
Time and time again teachers have shown their commitment to the user of ICT in their classrooms. Annually, approximately 10,000 thousands teachers participate in professional development in their own time but in the current ICT environment in their schools this is analogous to learning to drive and then sitting into a car with no wheels.
Minister Hanafin needs to demonstrate some clear commitment to this area in the form of urgent, targeted funding.
School computers are the new dinosaurs
The majority of computers now in schools antiquated and unusable and practically fossilised.
We would estimate that well over 60% of computers in schools are now over 5 years old and should be discarded. The most recent audit of computer facilities in Irish schools, published in 2006, shows that one fifth of computers are more than six years old and just 4% of computers are located in classrooms, with 58% in dedicated computer rooms. We would anticipate that the situation is worse now than it was then.
At a minimum, every classroom should have a digital projector and a laptop to enable teachers to use computer facilities in everyday lessons. Each school should also have a well equipped and state of the art computer room on a quota basis for every certain number of students.
The recent OECD report on ICT facilities ‘Are Students Ready for a Technology Rich World’ shows that Ireland compares unfavourably with other countries in terms of computer to student ratios and other key investment indicators.
Irish students were shown to lag behind in their attitude towards computers, with the country rated as having one of the least positive attitudes towards computers. Ireland also had one of the lowest percentages of frequent computer users at school among OECD countries.
Lack of Technical Support
At the moment, there is no available technical support for ICT facilities in schools. Ireland is unique in Europe in this respect, with every other country having technicians either on site or in locally accessible. We would recommend that ICT co-ordinating teachers be employed in schools – perhaps seconded from their current teaching duties - to help colleagues integrate information technology into their teaching methodologies. Such teachers could also co-ordinate the various technical problems that inevitably arise with such technology.
As it stands, too many schools are using satellite to get Internet access because of the lack of accessible broadband in the vicinity of their school. We still fall far behind the international average in terms of broadband penetration.
While the ‘pipeline’ is readily available, the speed of the Broadband is so slow as to make it useless in many cases. There is an urgent need to significantly increases the level of broadband being provided to school through the schools broadband programme.
Voucher Schemes
Finally, we believe that ‘Computers for Schools’ voucher initiatives are exploitative and widen the digital divide between richer schools with independent funding and those which rely on the paltry Government provision to update their equipment. Moreover, it is the Department of Education and Science’s duty to replace and update equipment, not the families of students.
Surely even the Minister can see a problem with our system when a school is forced to collect €242,400 worth of grocery receipts just to secure one desktop computer.”