85 Students from the Youth Leadership Council Receive Tablets from PWC
Eighty-five students of the Youth Leadership Council were recipients today of ten-inch tablets courtesy of PricewaterhouseCoopers and Peace Work. The organizations have been promoting financial literacy here for years and now that the students are not physically in classrooms, the tablets come in handy for distance learning. Here is News Five’s Duane Moody with a report.
Duane Moody, Reporting
Today, a handing over ceremony was held at the Marion Jones Sporting Complex where eighty-five secondary and tertiary school students received tablets courtesy of PricewaterhouseCoopers and Peace Work. The recipients are enrolled in the Youth Leadership Council, a mentorship programme that provides scholarships and helps to guide members through school.
Carol Babb
Dr. Carol Babb, Chief Education Officer
“They were donated by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Peace Work. All the students who received tablets today are members of a Youth Leadership Council. For the past twenty years, PricewaterhouseCoopers has come to Belize, supported Belize in the development of financial literacy. For twelve years, they have been giving scholarships up to the amount of forty thousand U.S. [dollars] yearly. So all these students we have given them scholarship yearly for four years and then we get another four and so every year we give about eighty scholarships yearly. I reached out to the executive director of peace work asking him to support the students with tablets because as you know our students are doing distance education and if they don’t have devices, these students will definitively log behind.”
The tablets are fully programmed with Microsoft suite and come with a keypad for ease of use. It’s similar to those which are to be imported and distributed by the Ministry of Education to students across the country for distance learning.
Patrick Flowers
Patrick Flowers, Science & Technology Coordinator, Ministry of Education
“You will be receiving an Atlas pro ten-inch tablet. Basically, it is a table that is detachable and it secured very good. The advantage with it compared to most tablets is that it comes along with a keypad. The keypad also has a touchpad so you don’t need to buy a wireless mouse or a Bluetooth mouse or so forth. Even though it is an android device with one of the most recent operating system—just shy of the ten—so it is an android nine pi operating system. With that, you could do a lot. The features as it relates to the tablet, it comes with two cameras. In terms of storage, as students, I know that beside school work, you might want to take pictures, you would want to have some memories, documents you’d want to save. So it comes with thirty-two gig internal storage.”
One of the recipients is senior at Saint John’s College, Christian Williams, who spoke of his experience in the programme.
Christian Williams
Christian Williams, Member, Youth Leadership Council
“This is my fourth year joining YLC and my past experience has been tremendously great in learning and developing influential and meaningful things each time we would meet. We the YLC would like to express our sincere gratitude to PWC and Peace Work for supporting and opening this forum and also for the tablets to assist us with our ongoing education. This will benefit us to gain easy access to our online classes and not to have to go to school for packages and now we can work from the comfort of our homes.”
Duane Moody for News Five.
