All the 65,000 government primary schools will be brought under multimedia classrooms' facility to promote ICT-based education among early graders to make their study easily understandable, interesting and attractive, an official said, reports BSS. “We are working on bringing all government primary schools under multimedia classrooms so that students get opportunity to access to digital education system,” said Dr Abu Hena Mostafa Kamal, directorate general of Directorate of Primary Education.
He said multimedia classrooms had already been introduced at 12,000 government primary schools out of 65,000.
Dr Abu Hena said children find their lessons more interesting in multimedia classrooms as they can understand their lessons easily, he said, adding, "We need quality content to make ICT-based education more effective and interactive to the students."
Teachers at the primary level are given two-week training so that they can develop quality contents for their students, he added.
Pointing out some infrastructural drawbacks, he said schools in relatively remote areas would require solar power for introducing digital classrooms.
“Our success in primary education, particularly increasing student enrolment, has been lauded internationally... Now we are giving focus on improving quality of primary education," the official said, adding multimedia classroom could be a best tool to ensure quality education.
Teachers' Portal is a platform for all primary, secondary and higher
secondary teachers. Teachers from general, vocational and madrasa education systems can become members of this portal. Here, teachers find necessary digital contents to facilitate their lessons using the available multimedia tools.
Dr Abu Hena, "There are 3.75 lakh teachers at government primary schools.
We are taking initiatives to enlist all teachers in the Teachers' Portal so that teachers can exchange their quality content and share their knowledge to develop quality digital contents".
In 2012, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had launched the multimedia classrooms at 1,000 schools throughout the country as a part of massive digitization campaign in the education sector.
Breaking the widespread myth about ICT in education, which consists of setting up expensive computer labs to provide basic computer literacy and technical knowhow, the government introduced multimedia classrooms using one laptop with internet connection and a multimedia projector per classroom, the Mass and Primary Education Ministry sources said.
This approach proved to be much cheaper than a full-fledged computer lab and thus economically more feasible, they added.
Directorate of Primary Education along with different organisations and development partners is working to promote ICT-based education at the primary level aiming to improve foundation skills.
As part of the initiative, Directorate of Primary Education and USAID's
Reading Enhancement for Advancing Development (READ) project, implemented by Save the Children in Bangladesh, jointly organised a daylong exhibition of teaching-learning materials recently.
Shahin Islam, deputy director-partnership management of READ Project, Save the Children in Bangladesh, said amplifying the use of interesting and child- friendly educational ICT materials, innovative reading and storytelling activities, and practice of learning from the android apps would significantly help ensure competency in literacy skills in Bangla .He said the ICT-based modern multimedia classrooms have opened up a new dimension in teaching-learning system of the educational institutions.
The digital contents in the multimedia classroom have emerged as a tool for the students to come out of memorising knowledge ending a more-than-a- century-old traditional teacher centred learning system, Shahin added.