Rose­marie Sant

The T&T Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA), which op­posed the lap­top pro­gramme of the for­mer Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment, says it ful­ly sup­ports the school lap­top ini­tia­tive an­nounced by Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia ear­li­er this week.

TTUTA pres­i­dent Lyn­d­say Doo­d­hai yes­ter­day said nev­er sup­port­ed the pro­gramme where each child en­ter­ing form one was giv­en a lap­top, be­cause “when they were dis­trib­uted, many of our schools were with­out func­tion­al com­put­er labs and we felt the mon­ey could have been bet­ter spent by out­fit­ting the labs in pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools with com­put­ers.”

The for­mer gov­ern­ment spent $250 mil­lion be­tween 2010 and 2013 on its lap­top ini­tia­tive. The new ini­tia­tive will see 153 sec­ondary schools get­ting 50 lap­tops each in Ju­ly.

Yes­ter­day, Doo­d­hai com­mend­ed the ap­proach of Gar­cia and the Gov­ern­ment, say­ing “we en­dorse the pro­vi­sion of lap­tops to sec­ondary schools.”

Doo­d­hai said he was sat­is­fied teach­ers were be­ing trained in prepa­ra­tion for the pro­gramme and while the fin­er de­tails of how the 50 com­put­ers will be used are still be be worked out, he was sat­is­fied it will be avail­able for “any teacher who wants to in­te­grate ICT in­to the cur­ricu­lum.”

He said the ini­tia­tive will al­so help bring this coun­try on board with oth­er coun­tries in the re­gion in terms of the e-test­ing in­tro­duced by the Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tions Coun­cil last year.

“If we are to come on board with the e-test­ing ap­proach where stu­dents will be ex­am­ined on­line, then there would be need for com­put­ers to be present in schools,” Doo­d­hai said.

His one con­cern has to do with se­cu­ri­ty.

“In the past few months we have had a num­ber of schools which have suf­fered break-ins where items were stolen from the schools.”

But Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia yes­ter­day as­sured the is­sue of se­cu­ri­ty is be­ing ad­dressed. He said the lap­tops will be placed in se­cured stor­age charg­ing carts and each school will be re­quired to come up with pro­to­cols to en­sure the se­cu­ri­ty of the com­put­ers.

Gar­cia said 100 ICT tech­ni­cians em­ployed by the min­istry at schools have been train­ing teach­ers. So far, 1,100 teach­ers have been trained.

The 13,600 com­put­ers re­quired for the roll-out of the ini­tia­tive have al­ready been or­dered and Gar­cia as­sured that the $50 mil­lion or­der was “above board and done via the Cen­tral Ten­ders Board.”

The com­put­ers will be dis­trib­uted to 91 gov­ern­ment sec­ondary schools, 45 gov­ern­ment-as­sist­ed sec­ondary schools, eight pri­vate sec­ondary schools and nine Ser­vol Life Cen­tres.

Ad­mit­ting that not all of the schools have in­ter­net ac­cess, Gar­cia said “be­cause of that we have a de­vice that we got from the Com­mon­wealth of Learn­ing, the Ap­tus De­vice, which will be used in ar­eas where there is no in­ter­net con­nec­tion.”

Ap­tus is con­sid­ered a rur­al broad­band spe­cial­ist which, ac­cord­ing to its web­site, de­liv­ers high qual­i­ty high speed re­li­able broad­band ser­vice us­ing car­ri­er class wire­less tech­nol­o­gy from the Cam­bi­um Net­work, a world leader in Wire­less Broad­band Tech­nol­o­gy.

Gar­cia said he was con­fi­dent that the de­vice “will al­low teach­ers to down­load the re­quired in­for­ma­tion to share with their stu­dents in the class­room.”