The department distributed 115 Information and Communication Technology packages sponsored by Old Mutual to schools across Gauteng.
According to the department, the packages which consist of laptops, projectors, modems and 3G cards, will enhance the quality of teaching in the classroom.
Speaking at the handover, education MEC Panyaza Lesufi said he sought to ensure that chalk boards and dusters became obsolete by ensuring that every pupil had a tablet, all classrooms had interactive boards and every teacher had a device.
Lesufi said he saw no reason why children should be restricted from accessing information and should be able to access vital information within the classroom. Pupils’ success should not be determined by where they came from, but from the quality of education they received, he said.
By next year, five schools would become paperless schools where technological devices would be used in the classroom.
Dubbed ‘classrooms of the future’, pupils in these schools would receive a tablet and be connected to the internet .
The department had obtained 88 000 tablets and existing Gauteng online centres would be used to train teacher and pupils to use the devices.
The programme would introduce tablets among pupils in grades 8-10 first, and then expand the project to grades 11-12 by 2016.
The devices would include security mechanisms to track them if they were stolen.
