By CHUSA SICHONE –

THE Parliamentary Committee on Education has recommended that the Government embraces the introduction of Information Technology Communication (ICT) in the school curriculum to improve the country’s education standards.
Committee chairperson Christopher Kalila said this after the committee’s tour of Kasisi Primary School in Chongwe District and TICO Community Centre in Lusaka’s Ng’ombe Township to familiarise themselves with the use of ZEduPad by learners yesterday.
A ZEduPad is a tablet computer, presently being promoted by iSchool, which contains thousands of multimedia lessons covering the entire Zambian primary curriculum in English and eight local languages.
Dr Kalila said there was need for Zambia to move in tandem with the changing technology in the education sector, among other areas, by embracing devices like the ZEduPad to help both teachers and learners thereby improving the country’s education standards.
“Both the learner and the teacher are finding this device (ZEduPad) very useful and we as a committee and speaking specifically as chairperson of this committee we would like to commend iSchool and urge the Government to embrace this device.
“We are living in an era of technology and we can’t afford to lag behind as a country. We need to move with the times and we need to improve our learning methods and there is no other better way to go rather than the use of ICT,” he said.
Dr Kalila also said teachers at the schools visited could not have been facing difficulties in implementing the local language policy if Government had initially piloted it before scaling it up and ensuring that the teachers are conversant with the languages they were teaching to avoid them misleading their learners.
iSchool corporate business development manager Miyanda Mulambo said iSchool had invested about US $6 million to come up with such an ICT initiative, which started as pilot project five years ago at five schools in Lusaka and Chongwe districts.
Mr Mulambo said the ZEduPad content addition and development by the iSchool staff was a continuous process and that it had proven to improve learning, adding that its approval by the Ministry of Education demonstrated the State’s commitment in embracing the ICT device.
Kasisi Primary School teacher Pai Mudenda, her TICO Community Centre counterpart Rachel Chiwelengongola as well as TICO Community Centre director Naomi Kumwenda outlined how helpful the ZEduPad had been to both teachers and learners.
The Parliamentary Committee members included Members of Parliament for Zambezi East (Sarah Sayifwanda) , Bwacha (Sydney Mushanga), Kwacha (Boniface Mutale), Chipata Central (Reuben Phiri), Kapiri Central (Eddie Musonda) and Siavonga (Kennedy Hamudulu).