Govt to provide more ICT-based education programmes

28-01-08
Page 11

THE Deputy Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), Ms Naana Biney, has said the government will provide the needed environment for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based educational programmes in schools in the country.
“ICT can be a powerful and essential tool for understanding, interpreting and communicating about the real world. When effectively deployed, it can mitigate teacher shortage and address inequalities in reference to gender, language and disability,” she said.
Ms Biney said this in a keynote address at the 2008 Heads of Schools Summit organised by e-toys & more in Accra last Friday.
The two-day summit provided a unique forum that enabled participants to have access to important global trends in education in order to help them to effect the necessary changes for better results in the country’s educational sector.
Ms Biney indicated that ICT in education was a panacea to accelerate learning, since it was self-directed, self-paced and provided the opportunity for students who were motivated and interested to take more responsibility for learning.
The Co-ordinator of the ICT in Education Programme at the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports, Rev Emmanuel Dadebo, said the country had a commitment to transform all schools into e-schools, with the ultimate goal of training the right type of human resource to drive its development agenda.
He said technology could promote effective instruction that was more student-centred, interdisciplinary, more closely related to real life events and processes and adaptive to individual learning styles.
“The capacity of ICT to reach students in any place and at any time has the potential to promote revolutionary changes in the traditional educational paradigm. First, it eliminates the premise that learning time equals classroom time,” he said.
The Executive Vice-President of e-toys & more, Mrs Theresa Sackey, said throughout the world ICT had become a major driving force and an important tool for promoting development, combating poverty and facilitating the integration of developing countries into the global economy.
He said the summit was taking place at an important time, adding that “in our quest to ensure that all the needs of our schools are met, we have added more innovative solutions to benefit the schools”.
“These include schools building and expansion solutions, schools SMS communication, as well as electronic board. We also continue to upgrade our e-learning centres with very powerful educational software, broad band Internet facilities, as well as the e-schools administrator, for effective school management,” she explained.
The Executive President of e-toys and more, Mr George Sackey Jnr, underscored the need for educational marketing on the part of school administrators.
That, he said, was to ensure that they attracted the right target groups.
Addressing participants on meeting the emotional needs of school children, Mrs Flora Sackey, who is a counsellor in that aspect, said children must be encouraged in all that they did to uplift their spirits and regain their self esteem.