Guro

The Philippine Department of Education has a Laptop for Teachers (LT4T) program, where teachers can avail of laptops from Acer and Neo for half the price. The computers, according to the Inquirer.net, will be “installed with several learning management tools, such as record books for students and teaching aids for fundamental subjects like mathematics, science and English.”

To top that, Microsoft will donate $7 for each laptop purchase. This, of course, also includes the Windows Operating System. However, it is not sure if it will include office productivity suite or other tools from Microsoft that cost an arm and a leg (and your soul!).

The requirement is simple: [1] teachers must have a minimum take home pay of PhP 4,000 per month (US$45) and [2] they pass a certification exam from certiport.com. Checking the required exam, the exam seems very basic but it will cost teachers $33. Now, I am not sure if that is provided by DepEd for free as well.

I do not see any other requirement on knowledge on how to integrate the use of technology in the classroom, so I dread to see this program be reduced to a computer being used as a glorified grade book and an extension of their manila paper presentations into Powerpoint slides, assuming that Microsoft gives it for free, of course.

One paragraph on Inquirer.net is a bit odd for me –

“The minimum specifications for the notebook are Core 2 processor with 2 gigabytes of memory and 160 gigabytes of hard disk. There is no maximum or minimum limit for the screen size of the notebooks.”

Netbooks are easily affordable and it does not need such a highly spec’d machine. I do not know what applications will DepEd load into these computers but I’d say an Intel Atom processor is more than enough for basic computing. I just see Microsoft’s hand in this program — why else would you need 2GB of RAM and a dual-core processor?

Contrast this program to the OLPC, where teachers AND students get their own computers. I honestly think that equipping the students is far more important than the teachers. Learners are the stars of the classroom and not the teacher. Ironically, I have heard from my wife, who attended a talk on education, that some people put the teacher as the star! No wonder our children are failing! 

Don’t get me wrong, I am a teacher, too. I am simply saying that we should give the students and teachers the tools at the same time. How can the teacher integrate technology in the classroom when his/her students do not have access to it?

Whilst this program seems to be another one of those programs from DepEd, I think that DepEd should really explore the possibility of hooking up with the OLPC — yes, even if it runs Microsoft Windows — and start giving our students access to the technology, too.

[images from Flickr:michale and Flickr:One Laptop Per Child]