MONTEGO BAY, St James — Minister of Education and Youth Fayval Williams is concerned that millions of dollars have been spent on providing technology that is being ignored by teachers and students.

It appears, she said, that gains made in harnessing technology at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic were being eroded.

“We have been talking about [technology in classrooms] well before the COVID pandemic. But the movement was slow. Yes, we required investment from Government which we saw accelerated during the pandemic. We saw our teachers step forward to be trained in the virtual space. Government made a lot of investments in devices for students. Yes, there has been learning loss, which we are making up, but the disappointing news about it is that now that we are post-COVID we are not seeing the continuation of technology in our classrooms,” she bemoaned.

Investments made, she said, included providing all primary school teachers with laptops and efforts have begun to expand that to all secondary school teachers. The minister said work has also started on upgrading all ICT labs in secondary schools “but we’re not seeing the use, we’re not seeing technology in our classrooms”.

She was delivering greetings during last Wednesday’s opening ceremony of the three-day Teachers’ Colleges of Jamaica Bi-Annual Research Conference at the Holiday Inn Resort in Montego Bay.

The conference was held under the theme ‘Preparing Teachers for the Next Education Task Force: Implications for National Development’.

The education minister spoke about the Government’s efforts to ensure that broadband technology is widely available in schools.

“Our goal is to have Wi-Fi across the campus of our schools — primary, secondary and early childhood — so that it is available in classrooms in our schools. We are 60 per cent on the way of bringing the broadband connectivity to schools. We’re still in the procurement process of ensuring that we have the propagation of Wi-Fi in schools, but we would love to be encouraged. We want to know that the investment is not just there to gather dust, that our teachers will be using it in advancing to enrich the teaching and learning experience,” Williams stated.

She also pointed to her ministry’s recent announcement that “every single” primary and secondary school student in Jamaica now has access to a Microsoft 365 licence through which they can benefit from the use of the entire platform which includes Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Even though e-mailed instructions on how to download the software were sent to each student and bulletins sent to principals to encourage students to make use of the opportunity, there has not been much take-up, Williams said.

“When we look at the data in terms of the download, it is not encouraging at all,” she disclosed.

“And so I want to use this forum here today, to encourage you, when you go back to your schools, speak with your teachers, speak with your principals to find out what’s happening. Why aren’t students downloading? And we know the students have devices. Yes, not every student has a device, but we continue as a Government to ensure that our students can remain connected,” the minister said.

She also cited the lukewarm response to lesson plans created to ease the burden on educators who complained that they spent hours on weekends preparing for lessons ahead.

“We employed our teaching colleges to help us to create lesson plans; the same colleges that our teachers would have gone to and learned about lesson plans. Again when we look at the take-up, it is extremely low. We spent millions of dollars for lesson plans,” she pointed out.

Despite her disappointment Williams, however, underscored Government’s continued commitment to providing both the technological and physical resources needed.