CABINET has recently approved the sum of $29.8M for the purchase of laptops for teachers, under the Guyana Improving Teacher Education Project (GITEP).

Head of the Presidential Secretariat and Cabinet Secretary, Dr. Roger Luncheon made the disclosure yesterday at his usual weekly media briefing in Office of the President, Shiv Chanderpaul Drive, Georgetown.
GITEP, initiated by the Ministry of Education, with funding from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), aims to address quality of delivery in the classroom by first attending to the management of teacher education and programmes offered at Cyril Potter College of Education (CPCE) and the University of Guyana (UG).
The process was designed in keeping with the Administration’s resolve to establish ICT (Information Communication Technology) laboratories in all secondary schools.
“And it, logically, followed that teachers would have to acquire those skills to give the optimum benefit from having ICT labs in every high school across this country,” Luncheon explained.
The laptops to be granted the teachers are not the same as the ones that are distributed under the OLPF (One Laptop per Family) scheme, but others with enhanced specifications.

SPECIFICALLY TRAINED
“This is an annual activity that, every year, teachers who are in the secondary programme and are going to graduate into the secondary school system, are going to be specifically trained to have optimum benefit from the laboratories in the school system. Those teachers would acquire this knowledge,” he pointed out.
The HPS said Government is into training teachers in ICT for, minimally, their use in the school system but, understandably, for their own intellectual and other achievements.
Meanwhile, one component of GITEP featured the introduction of the ADE (Associate Degree in Education) at the CPCE, with the objective of shortening the time spent acquiring a degree.
It allows for teachers to obtain an education degree in five years instead of the usual nine years.
The Government Information Agency (GINA) had said that Government was cognisant of the need to have an educated human resource base to build the nation and has, thus, been investing substantially in education.
Over the years, Government’s investments have facilitated universal access to primary education and extended coverage in the area of secondary education.
Government has also created more opportunities for technical and vocational training through infrastructure development and expanding vocational training across the country.
There have also been extended opportunities at the level of the University of Guyana.