May Pen Primary principal recommends specialised tablet for reading intervention
Published:Friday | August 26, 2022 | 12:06 AMCecelia Campbell-Livingston/Gleaner Writer
Major Paul Scott, principal of the May Pen Primary School, has been hooked on a specially made tablet called Learnit since he attended a diaspora conference on education, which was held in Manhattan, New York, earlier this year.
Major Scott said that after viewing the presentation from the exhibitor, he realised the potential of the device to assist students, as well as other persons across the island, who may need technological intervention to enhance their learning.
Expounding on the differences between the specialised tablet and that which was offered under the Government’s E-Learning Project, Scott said the device is equipped with several user-friendly educational apps and resources which target kindergarten to grade-six-level learners. It also correlates with the school’s curriculum.
“With this tablet, they can sit by themselves and learn to read. It is self-paced. If a parent has one, they can work at the child’s pace. It has several subject areas, several topics, and the child can learn at their own pace,” he explained.
Major Scott said he has already secured five for his school, and those will be placed in the reading intervention programme. He intends to ask parents to purchase the devices to enhance their children’s own learning experience.
A website which featured the device noted that the idea for developing the tablet came about after developers visited high schools in a number of islands, to provide software for government-issued laptops for school programmes. They realised then that high-school students all over the Caribbean were struggling to read.
“Teachers and parents sounded the alarm about the severity of the reading and numeracy problems, and pushed the team to help fix the problems at the kindergarten and primary levels. The challenge was to find technology that would help students to master reading, writing comprehension, math, art, grammar, music, languages, science, and more, to build a foundation for learning to bridge the digital divide without using the Internet,” it read.
There are more than 190 hands-on, full-version, interactive apps on Learnit valued at more than US$900.
Antoinette Brown Thomas, a teacher and parent, had high praises for the learning device, and visited the school to purchase one of the gadgets for her five-year-old child who, despite her intervention, always finds a way to navigate to other sites on the Internet.