And we caught up with the Fort George area rep on his turf as he visited four schools in his area. These schools were only a fraction of those that will be receiving brand new Chromebooks over the next few days.
This donation is part of the effort of the Ministry of Education to bridge the digital divide that was started during the pandemic. And these upper level children will now have the chance to familiarize themselves with the technology before heading off to high school.
Courtney Menzies tagged along today and has this story.
Six Belize City primary schools can now integrate technology into their upper level classes after they were given Chromebooks by the Ministry of Education.
The first round of distribution started in the Fort George area, and the area rep told us that the devices were donated by the Taiwanese Government during the president's visit to Belize.
Henry Charles Usher, Area Rep, Fort George
"When the president of Taiwan was in Belize, she agreed to make a donation of devices and 5,000 chrome books were donated to the students, to the schools in Belize and those are just the start of those donation and how the Ministry of Education decided was, they looked at standards 5 and 6 and they gave out 15% of the total population, so what you're seeing here is 15% of the population of this Ebenezer school for those two classes and certainly we want to encourage the school and students to use the devices for the proper purposes and to be responsible with these devices and certainly it's part of the technological revolution that Plan Belize and this government has been pushing forward."
And as the Minister of Education explained, this technological revolution began with giving schools internet access post pandemic, and now the most needy were chosen to receive the Chromebooks.
Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"A central component of that plan is technology and making sure the students across the country have greater access to technology, reliable technology. As you all know, we launch the ConnectED project so we wanted to ensure that our schools across the country had access to reliable internet services. That has been a huge success, we've expanded reliable internet services to over 200 schools across the country over the last two years and we want to of course complement that with devices, giving our students devices."
"They were selected by our technical team, all based on need, we did a very detailed analysis and assessment of our needs, technological needs. Some schools had gotten before so it was based on needs, it's for standard 4, 5 and 6 and this first contribution, distribution provides 15% devices to the students in standard 4, 5 and 6. So it was done in a very scientific, strategic way to ensure that those students who need them most in those communities who need them most would be getting them."
And these schools couldn't be happier to get these devices since they say it will transform the way their students learn.
Dina Avila, Teacher, Ebenezer Methodist School
"Right now we have the new curriculum which is competency based and we are trying to incorporate a lot of hands on and also our science has been changed from science to science and technology so we are trying to incorporate technology but as you may know, different parents have different struggles so we are not able to really have each student being a technology device in the class so these chrome books are to be very helpful. They allow us, the Google Suite, and with the Google Suite, we can introduce the Google Docs, the Google Powerpoint, which is a new way of them even doing presentations to move away from that poster and to be quite honest everything is moving in the direction of technology, so we really need to get them involved."
Carol Flowers, Acting Principal, St Mary's Primary School
"It was amazing when I got the call to say that our students would have received it. We are in a technological era so these will help to enhance education here at St Mary's."
"We'll have to work it out but I'm sure that the teachers will work together with the students to share when they're in the classroom, I don't know about taking it home but we'll figure it out because it's something that we definitely need."
Colin Estrada, Principal, All Saints School
"The last time media was here is that we had a handing over ceremony of projectors and so at present we have all classes except infant 1 and infant 2 that have projectors installed and so what will happen is that this will lend and this will just add to the digital classes that we give whereby teachers will be able to use the laptops with students and then also we're apart of the coding [program] so that will also help in that area whereby students will be able to do the code in the classrooms so that they will be able to learn how to code."
"From COVID we have been integrating technology because during COVID we did a simple thing where all of the students at All Saints had an All Saints email address so that they would be able to access Google classroom so with that, when teachers do their work, they're able to post it from the PowerPoints that they have into the Google classrooms and then parents are able to also see that so it's just a further integration of what we're doing."
Holy Redeemer, Queen Street Baptist, and St Joseph also received devices today.
And in total, 156 schools across the country will be receiving Chromebooks, including almost all government high schools.
Tomorrow two high schools and six primary schools from the Southside will be receiving their Chromebooks.
