The Taipei City Government plans to spend about NT$100 million (US$3.2 million) to buy tablet computersfor pupils at 50 elementary schools to aid an “e-learning” initiative proposed last year.
The initiative, proposed by Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), aims to provide students from different backgrounds equal access to educational resources.
The Taipei Department of Education’s CooC Cloud is an online database of digital learning materials for elementary to senior-high school students.
Sixth-graders practiced their writing skills and drew pictures based on a documentary using their tablets during a demonstration on Wednesday at the Affiliated Experimental Elementary School of the University of Taipei.
Their individual work was uploaded to a touch-sensitive “white board” for the whole class to see, a feature that teacher Shih Hsiu-mei (施秀美) said was conducive to students taking inspiration and learning from each other.
The accessible online content is controlled by the school so students are not able to surf the Web during classes.
Another class demonstrated the importance of empathy. Using tablets, students took photographs of their classmates portraying different moods. The photographs were projected on the screen as teacher Lee Pei-yi (李佩怡) talked with students about facial expressions and body language. The class then discussed ethics and morality.
“Learning becomes a more animated process with the help of the devices, which in turn elicits a greater response from the children,” Lee said.
“There is not much involved technically in operating the devices, which means children learn almost anything right then and there,” she said.
The department has purchased tablets for 19 elementary schools and hopes to increase that number to 50 in the fall semester, that starts in September, department Commissioner Tseng Tsan-chin (曾燦金) said.
While the department will buy 7,500 tablets in the first few years of the initiative, it hopes that by 2021, every student would buy their own tablet as part of their required school materials, he said.
Responding to criticism from Taipei City Councilor Wang Wei-chung (王威中) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) that buying tablets for pupils is a “waste of money,” Tseng said that the department would be able to bargin down the unit price as it will be placing large orders.
The tablets bought by the city would be passed down to younger students or lent to students from financially disadvantaged families, he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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