PESHAWAR: Around 70 per cent of the 600 interactive smart boards installed in the government schools at a cost of Rs260 million are not being used by teachers, mainly because of their lack of interest and computer proficiency, according to sources.

They said that the Elementary and Secondary Education Department had installed 600 interactive smart boards in the government high and higher secondary schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa during last two years ago to teach the students with the help of audiovisuals tools.

The interactive smart board (ISB) is an advanced teaching tool, which is very useful in teaching biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics through audiovisuals with the help of already installed software, they said.

Over 600 such boards costing Rs260m have been installed in KP govt schools

The education department is set to install ISBs in 500 more schools in the ongoing financial year, the sources said, noting that even the famous private schools had not provided this facility to their students.

After installation of ISBs the education department provides one day training to two teachers from each school on how to operate these boards, they said. Being not familiar with the information technology, the sources said that the teachers were not taking interest in the training.

They said that the lack of interest was stated to be five to six hours training at a stretch. The teachers picked very little from the training as everything was new for them.

Like cellular phones sets, they said, the ISB’s commands would be learned by more usage and involvement. Instead of imparting their lectures through ISBs the teachers prefer the traditional method of loudly reading a topic from the textbooks and sometime using the black boards.

They teachers using ISBs are very happy, saying these boards are a very effective teaching tool. “If possible the government should install ISBs in each classroom because the teacher can easily make the students understand about any complicated topic,” a teacher of the Government Higher Secondary School City No. 1 told this correspondent.

He said that only one ISB had been installed at the computer lab of his school. The 10 sections of class 9th and 10th had been using it, the teacher said. So a timetable has been made to give chance to each section to use ISB, he said.

The teacher said that the ISB was very helpful for students in clearing their concepts of different topics. “The teachers are not required to draw diagrams on the blackboard or display the charts for teaching purposes as everything is installed in the ISB,” he said.

He said that teachers needed to be provided refresher training courses about how to operate ISB, adding it had made the teaching process easy and convincing by doing away with the traditional teaching methods.

When contacted for comments, a senior official of E&SE Department said that the department had planned to arrange refresher training for the teachers, as they were not much interested in the previous training when ISBs were introduced for the first time.

“Efforts are underway to establish a monitoring mechanism for ISBs,” he said. The official said that each school would be visited after two months to check whether the teachers were using ISBs or not. The problems in use of ISBs would be ascertained during the visits to schools, he said.

Published in Dawn September 5th, 2016