Election tablet? More like a suppository

It would appear that the PN and PL have taken this "quantum leap" without handing the "road map" to the most vital cogs in any educational system - the teacher. While many are already feasting at this banquet of state dirigisme, Kevin Bonello, president of the Malta Union of Teachers insists that teaching staff have more pressing matters on their plate.

"How is a primary school teacher meant to manage twenty children all using their tablets? How can they guarantee that it is being used for educational purposes and not just as a toy?" Bonello asked.

The Labour Party has said it will set up 'A tablet per Child Fund', actively encouraging participation from the private sector (which seems to have become the PL's solution for everything). The cost of providing 4,000 tablets to primary school children is said to be €1.5 million.

The PN has taken things one step further. It wants to provide tablets to all State, Church and Independent school children at both the primary and secondary level. The cost of providing 50,000 tablets has been put at €23.7 million over four years. According to PN candidate Claudio Grech, the government will fund €15.7 million of this and the remainder shall be funded by the European Social Fund.

But what of the ancillary costs? Primary schools in the Church school sector generally do not employ IT administrators. Tablets cannot simply be put into the hands of primary schoolchildren without a hefty IT staff waiting in the wings to fix the array of issues that will inevitably crop up with such an intricate piece of hardware.

The PN's plans are even more optimistic. A whole army of IT administrators and specialists are going to be required in order to ensure the smooth running of these tablets in every single school in Malta. Is the PN going to pay for the extra staff for church schools and independent schools too?

Bonello points out that "secondary school teachers are still absorbing the reforms made to the current e-learning platform".

One state school teacher admitted that "the interactive whiteboards are rolled out during parents' day, ogled over by parents and teachers alike and then left to gather dust. Compatibility issues already exist between different brands of whiteboards, so one only wonders how tablets are going to fit into the whole eco-system".

Tablets as an education tool are no panacea. Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi has declared that "the value of these tablets will be in their content". But teachers are needed to unlock this content and ensure that it is transmitted in a meaningful way.

Another teacher speaking to MaltaToday said: "I am still struggling to get to grips with the interactive whiteboards, let alone a tablet. You cannot simply provide us with these tablets and expect us to deliver overnight. This is going to require a change in culture and teacher focus."

The costs of both the IT expertise and teacher training have been conveniently overlooked by both parties. Teachers' training hours are strictly controlled by collective agreements. The added training required for teachers to be adequately proficient in utilising the tablets will probably require the MUT to thrash out a fresh agreement, which is no small task in itself. Bandwidth and cloud computing costs are another question mark in both parties' tablet proposals, and it remains to be seen whether the government of the day will carry the burden of all this costs.

The lack of consultation by both parties with the MUT is painfully obvious. Its president confirms that neither party consulted the union on this issue. "With all due respect to the government, teachers have more important matters to attend to," Kevin Bonello said.

Apart from material considerations, a much thornier problem exists - that of bullying. As things stand, any bullying carried out through the internet off school premises does not, strictly speaking, fall within the school's remit, explains a head of an independent school. "With tablets being used within the school's premises, teaching staff are going to have to somehow be vigilant of this potential form of cyber bullying".

As one teacher sagely puts it, "tablets in classrooms will be a necessary progression for the National Curriculum Framework to be fully realised. But to introduce them into the public debate at this stage was premature. One hopes they will not detract from the real issues that need to be discussed, especially ways of supporting teachers more in mixed ability classrooms."