Gov’t students mate 1 tablets to replace textbooks in future – MoE

The Minister for Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum says the introduction of students mate 1 tablets forms part of the central government’s attempt in the future to phase out textbooks by infusing them into the electronic devices.

In a discussion with JoyNews, he said about 450,000 tablets will be distributed to students in government second cycle schools across the country next week. He clarified that the unit price for each tablet is $250, and not GHS250.

The distribution of the electronic device to prospective students, under the Ghana Smart School Project (GSSP), Dr Adutwum said is part of the government’s measures to ensure that all sectors of the country are digitised.

“The 450,000 is a little less than 30 %, the deployment is such that it is in three phases. The first phase which is hitting the regions and schools in the next coming week, is going to 32 schools in the 16 regions,” the Education Minister said.

In a related development, the Ghana National Association of Authors and Publishers has questioned the content of Senior High School (SHS) students tablets procured by the central government under the Ghana Smart Schools Project.

Citing the lack of comprehensive content, the President of the Publishers, John Amponsah in an interview monitored by Thisterm.com said the content of the tablet supposed to replace the hard copy textbooks should be reviewed.

He said it is strange how the Ghana Education Service (GES) produce and uploads comprehensive content on tablets just two weeks after a new curriculum was released by the National Council for Curriculum & Assessment.

“Just last two weeks, the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NACCA) released the curriculum, so how did they manage to upload the new content onto the tablets,” he quizzed in the interview with Abusua 98.5 FM.

Mr John contended that the content on the tablets supplied to students was not comprehensive and could not align with the curriculum insisting that publishers and writers create educational materials based on the curriculum provided.

“I can prove when given the tablets that the content is not comprehensive, look, if you go to Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, the Creatives Art Industry Lecturers were part of those who wrote the curriculum

Ask them if any attempt has been made to convert that into a learnable book. Nothing of a sort has been done so where are they getting the notes,” he quizzed.