The National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) has advised the Ministry of Education to allow Senior One and Two learners to possess and use smartphones at schools.
This comes shortly after officials at NCDC were bombarded with complaints from some schools about delayed delivery of textbooks that would guide them to deliver the new lower secondary curriculum whose implementation started in 2020.
John Okumu, manager secondary department at NCDC says that with the challenges in the distribution of textbooks, the ministry should consider allowing learners to use smartphones to study.
“All schools have been teaching on Zoom, online and students have been having these phones throughout the holiday and have been using them as tools of learning. So I don’t see the reason why now they have come back to school we stop them. And even if all these textbooks are all in schools, they are not enough.” Said Okumu.
Affordability;
He cited a couple of highly populated schools like Mengo Secondary School that has about 1,000 students in Senior One, explaining that the government would not be able to supply 1,000 textbooks, and this is where smartphones would come in handy.
“And even if we told each parent to buy textbooks, the 12 textbooks for senior one alone would cost a lot of money. But this phone can have soft copies of all those textbooks because they are on the websites,” he said.
City Secondary Wakiso Director of Studies (DoS) says that the school decided to use social media platforms to give notes to students, instead of online learning platforms.
‘’We wanted to deliver Zoom classes during the second lockdown, but besides the issues of network and data, we also discovered that our teachers were not competent to teach via Zoom,’’ says Ssemujju.
While the NCDC has developed the content for the revised lower secondary curriculum, its delivery is still limited by the lack of textbooks. Arguably, the use of smartphones can help to access and deliver content online.
Since this new curriculum is learner-centered, and every student is expected to do thorough research and come up with their own notes, smartphones could be the perfect tool to facilitate this.
Government policy.
According to Dr Jane Egau, the director of high education and training in the ministry of Education and Sports, the government is in the process of completing the ICT policy in schools.
Although there is no policy at the moment, Egau says the Covid lockdown status quo where learners were using phones to learn can continue.
Okumu suggests that schools have internal policies on how to regulate and control the way their learners use these devices.