Objectives
- To foster, facilitate, enhance and build functional collaboration,
cooperation and the pooling of resources among students, teachers,
managers and administration in education through the use of Intranets
and the Internet.
- To improve and modernise teaching and learning through the use
of information and communications technology applied to the teaching
and learning processes in schools.
- To ensure that all students leaving a school system at the end
of at least nine years of schooling are computer literate and can
effectively use information and communications technology applied
to the activities of daily life.
- To improve, modernise and make more efficient the management of
schools and Ministries of Education through education management
information systems that are networked and linked dynamically.
- To expand the pool and improve the quality of persons in the OECS
who can be educated and trained as information and communications
technology specialists.
General
Philosophy
Information and communications technology has become ubiquitous in
its applications to modern life. It is a tool of work, learning, entertainment,
communication and management. As important is the fact that it has
become a symbol of modernisation and progress. For people living, learning
and working on islands but who wish to share a common destiny, information
and communication technology becomes a virtual bridge across the expanse
of sea that separates islands from each other.
Information and communications technology applied to education reform
in the OECS, therefore, does not only represent a skills of skills
to be acquired for its effective use, but more importantly as tools
of learning, teaching and management as well as a symbol of modernisation
and progress, and most critically as a virtual bridge linking students
in schools and colleges, managers and administrators in institutions
and Ministers within and across islands. Taken together information
and communications technology skills can be effectively applied to
modernise and enhance teaching, learning and management, mobilise new
support for education and provide the infrastructure for regional collaboration,
cooperation and the pooling of resources to unprecedented levels. The
impact of the latter is likely to be a great sense of sub-regional
identity and solidarity than could be achieved by any other means.
The revolution that has taken place in information and communications
technology is ushering in the knowledge society. Wealth creation is
now predicated on knowledge and technological competence matched with
creativity and perspicacity. Schools and colleges are about knowledge
- generation, dissemination and acquisition. Schools and colleges are,
therefore, seen as focal points in the knowledge network centrepiece
of community access that can interface with the information and communications
technology infrastructure. As information and communication resources
are established in schools and colleges, they must serve the wider
communities in which they are located with respect to access and training
in their use. In this regard, the sharp boundaries of in school and
out-of-school will be blurred and rendered ambiguous in meaning. |
