Thai Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has finally
selected SCOPE, a tablet producer from China, as the winning bidder for the
government's tablet PCs for school students
Four Chinese tablet manufacturers have submitted bids for
the project. There are Huawei, TCL, Haier and SCOPE as recommended by the Chinese government.
The tablet’s
specifications under Scope company matches the government’s requirement – a seven-inch touch screen, 16-gigabyte memory, and dual-core
CPU., operate under the Android 3.2 Honeycomb system and the tablets’ cost are around 2,400
baht per unit.
Tablet PCs for schoolchildren is one
of the popular policies that Pheu Thai Party promised with the voters during
the election campaign last year. One Tablet per Child policy leads to the widespread debates
over suitable educational content and control of inappropriate content and
misuse of the devices. (For
more information http://english.sina.com/business/2012/0305/445888.html)
I strongly disagree with this policy
because I think Thai government did not do the research well before making it real. Comparing to
Singapore that they already use the tablet PCs in many schools, Thailand is
far away from the word “ready.”
First of all, Thai first grade
students are lack of responsibilities – they cannot take care of high technology appliances.
The small children will not use them for study.
Secondly, teachers have to take more
responsibilities in order to control the students’ use of tablets and the theft
problem.
Tertiary, will the tablets work
efficiently? Due to the distribution of tablets for primary school students from over
600,000 units to 900,000 in the next three months, will the Scope company produce them in time? Moreover,
what if the tablets breakdown, will the government take responsibilities for
the expenses? If not, the parents have to pay for all the cost.
Finally, I do not think this policy
will help in Thai small students’ learning. Instead of paying such a lot of money on
these tablets, the government should spend that money to support the whole country's education.
I do agree with Chattip that we are not ready to deploy this policy to the first grade students. Money and the manufacturing country issues aside, I am more concern about the effectiveness of the program. Our curriculum and teaching personnel have not been prepared for the policy. The process of designing the curriculum alone could take up to one year and at least another one up to two years of testing and redesigning, in which Thailand has never done such process before. Initiating such an important matter in a hurry will not do Thailand any good.
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ReplyDeleteI agree with both of you, it is too soon to start this policy. The policy was just created a few years ago, how they can design an effective digital curriculums and train teachers to teach students in a very short time. Besides, I wonder why the target students are the first grade students. I don’t think the policy is appropriate for them. They just graduated from the kindergarten level -practice drawing and writing on notebook might be more effective than using tablet PCs – at least they get good hand writing.
ReplyDeleteืำNeither do I, agree with this policy. The government may think it’s the way to enhance the country’s education by applying the use of technology and implanting it into the students of the new generation. In addition to everyone’s opinions, to me, the enormous expenditure that government will spend on this policy can be more useful to many other projects like enhancing the living condition of the poor and managing environmental pollution causing natural disasters. Somehow, I think that the policy might be another kind of exploitation. There are many other effective strategies, not having to spend such big amount of money, that can be used to improve Thai education. It’s not that hard to find ones if the government really would like to.
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