Education Minister: High Schools Transitioning to Digital Platform
Patrick Faber
High schools across the country are going digital. A letter of intent has been signed between G.O.B. and Belize Telemedia Limited which paves the way for a digital revolution in the way students learn in the classroom. So say goodbye to pen and paper and even text books, as they will be replaced by electronic devices for test, quizzes, research and every day school work. The project has been piloted in nine high schools and come the new 2019 school year, all first and second form classes in these nine schools will make the full transition. Minister Faber made the announcement during his address this morning at the P.S.E. Awards Ceremony.
Patrick Faber, Minister of Education
“We’ve been piloting a digital platform initiative in nine of our secondary schools, in one first form class. That pilot is now concluded and in fact our intent with B.T.L./Digi is to ensure that for the start of the new school year, in those nine schools, all the first formers and all the second formers will receive their device and will operate on a digital platform for all of their classes. That is big. And next school year, we hope to roll out to beyond those nine schools. We hope then to advance it to something like twenty-odd schools and in the next year after that, by 2021/22, I believe it is, we are going to have forty-three of our high schools—and there are only about fifty-odd schools—forty-three of them and the only limitation is bandwidth that allows us to only go to those forty-three. Maybe by that time, we will be able to expand the bandwidth to all areas. But all of these schools will be operating on a digital platform: instruction, test taking, quizzes, everything is going to be done on the individual student devices. And you would remember that we are have been working on digitizing the text books; we will continue with that. We’ve not been able to find a provider that is affordable to meet our needs, but we continue to work. When we find that, we load that on to that very same platform that Digi is helping us with and it is going to be a new revolution in this country. And this is happening now; it’s not promised for the future; it is happening now. It will gradually be rolled out so we are very excited about the possibilities and the realities now in education here in Belize.”
