NADALEEN SINGH

Teach­ers of Form One are will al­so re­ceive lap­tops when the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion be­gins dis­tri­b­u­tion of the the com­put­ers next month. The teach­ers would get the com­put­ers to train the chil­dren, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh said at yes­ter­day's post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence. The promise of lap­tops was first made by the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship, dur­ing the gen­er­al elec­tion cam­paign.

"The teach­ers have to teach the stu­dents by us­ing their lap­tops, there­fore they must be au courant with the lap­tops that the stu­dents are us­ing, so they (the teach­ers) must have sim­i­lar lap­tops," Gopeesingh said. "There are eight sub­jects in each one of the Form One class­es and there are some­times four and five Form One class­es. "We have 151 schools...if we have five teach­ers in five class­es, that is 750 mul­ti­plied by eight sub­jects, is close to 6,000 com­put­ers that are need­ed."

Gopeesingh added that the Gov­ern­ment bought 20,400 and more than 16 thou­sand would be dis­trib­uted to the stu­dents and some to the teach­ers. Re­gard­ing train­ing for the teach­ers, he said it had been on­go­ing. "A man­u­al of poli­cies is be­ing es­tab­lished for the guid­ance of all teach­ers, prin­ci­pals, vice-prin­ci­pals, par­ents and stu­dents for the use of the lap­top," the min­is­ter said. "We have al­most com­plet­ed the cur­ricu­lum for many of the sub­jects for in­fu­sion in­to the teach­ing. We had a meet­ing this morn­ing and we had a re­port on it."