Teachers given tablets yet to use them fully in school or at home

PETALING JAYA: Teachers who have received a free computer tablet from the government have not begun to use it fully.

They only use it for basic things like taking notes or finding information online, said Kamarozaman Abd Razak, president of the National Union of the Teaching Profession (NUTP).

He said not all teachers had received the tablet yet as it was currently being distributed in stages.

“The special features from the tablet for teachers to implement creative teaching have not yet been implemented and are still being discussed,” he said.

Utusan Melayu Bhd, which publishes the daily newspaper Utusan Malaysia and Kosmo, has been given the contract to supply more than 180,000 tablets to teachers throughout the country this year, according to the Deputy Education Minister P Kamalanathan.

The tablet comes packaged with an app for easy access to the company’s newspapers.

But strangely, teachers interviewed said they have not used the app yet to read the news online.

Nurul Shafiyah Mustafa Kamal, 31, who teaches at a secondary school in Perak, said she received the tablet in August but had not used it much since then.

“The quality isn’t that good but it’s practicable for basic use like searching for information online or taking notes,” said Nurul.

She admitted that she had not read Utusan using the app since she rarely used the tablet and preferred to use her laptop.

The tablet supplied is a Lenovo Tab 3 Essential with a 7-inch display screen and resolution of 1024 X 600.

It runs on an Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system and a 1.3 GHz quad-core processor.

Another teacher, who did not want to be named, working at a secondary school in Jempol, Negeri Sembilan, said he used the tablet at school but has not been using it much at home.

“I have used the tablet to connect to the projector a few times before during lessons.

“It is useful because it encourages senior teachers like me who are reluctant to use electronic devices to start using them. This makes our work more efficient actually,” he told FMT.

However, he too does not use the Utusan app on the tablet to read the news. -FMT