Adopt technology to improve education--Sackey

THE Chief Executive Officer of the Digital Education Group (DEG), Mr George Sackey, has urged educational institutions and parents to take advantage of emerging information and communications technology to improve teaching and learning.


“Education is very dynamic and especially in this technological age, educational technology is growing very fast. The world is departing from the traditional blackboard, straightjacket way of learning.”
“It is now about inculcating new learning methods including modern science and technology,” he said at an e-learning conference in Accra.

Conference aims
The conference, organised jointly by DEG and Intelitek, brought together more than 500 players in the educational sector made up of proprietors of schools, teachers and officials from polytechnics.
The participants were taken through areas in developing e-learning and virtual classrooms, provision of e-science laboratories in schools and the role of robotics in modern education.

According to Mr Sackey, education was moving to a system known as STEM education.

 STEM is a curriculum based on the idea of educating students in four specific disciplines — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — in an interdisciplinary and applied approach. Rather than teach the four disciplines as separate and discrete subjects, STEM integrates them into a cohesive learning paradigm based on real-world applications.

“It is an area that the sub-region lacks capacity. It is a new area of education we would like to bring to the country and ultimately the entire Africa,” Mr Sackey said.

He said the company would begin to train people in interested schools and also work with the Ghana Education Service to adopt it to complement the country’s educational curricula.

The participants were taken through e-learning systems that could be adapted to suit local needs or curriculum.

Mr Sackey said DEG was committed to working with the Ghana Education Service (GES) to make e-learning and the other platforms part of the country’s curriculum.
Classroom can be exciting for students

The DEG CEO said he was in Israel recently and Israeli use of virtual classrooms was so advanced that children on admission in hospitals still had access to education without disruptions, as the hospitals had schools.

The CEO of Intelitek, Mr Ido Yerushami, who walked the participants through the company’s products, said the company’s educational products were designed to make learning interactive and engaging for children.

“Learning should make children excited to continue the learning process and not to feel bored in the classroom. The learning process today is such that children want to learn with things they see in their daily lives.

He observed that the problem with the conventional educational system was that it placed too much emphasis on knowledge acquisition and the passing of exams at the expense of students’ inborn capabilities.

“Research shows that conventional teaching methods are good but they are not as efficient as allowing children to learn while playing and at the same time learn from their mistakes.”

Mr Yerushami stated that the new wave of education was for students to have hands on virtual experience; a situation that made it easy for them when they were exposed to the reality of