The Chamber of Olhão will offer tablets to all students in the municipality, from the 4th to the 12th year, in the next three years. The municipality is going to invest 300 thousand euros a year, introducing digital education in schools in the country, through a technological solution provided by Altice Portugal.
The agreement between the city of Olhão and Altice that will allow delivering, in total and over three years, around 4500 tablets to students between the 4th and 12th grades and teachers of schools in the municipality, in an investment of around 900 euros, was signed today, Thursday.
At the beginning of the next school year, all 4th, 7th and 10th year students and their respective teachers will receive one of these brand new equipment and already with software, namely pedagogical resources from Porto Editora.
«In this first year, tablets will be delivered to 1440 students and teachers, as the latter will also have to have the same tool, to be on an equal footing», according to António Pina, mayor of Olhão.
Over the next two years, the investment will be repeated, always with students from these three years of schooling, so that all students in Olhão can have their own tablet.
For this, the municipality will have to pay “almost one million euros”. Even so, assured the mayor from Olhano, the adventure will be taken into account, taking into account everything that is involved, thanks to our partner Altice.
"Altice's role is to follow this dream of ours and to achieve, within what was established in the specifications, to bring a price and offer a quality of the platform that we are going to provide as there is no equal in the market, at this price", he said. António Pina.
In this way, he considered, this «is also an investment by Altice», which will also «follow the project, because they are interested in this going well».
The company does not intend to stop in Olhão and aims for this “pilot project”, as Alexandre Fonseca, executive director of Altice, called it, can be replicated in other parts of the country.
«We made a significant effort, from a commercial point of view, to participate in a project that we understood, from the beginning, as a reference, as it is unique and unprecedented in Portugal, which will certainly become a reference for other municipalities, because we believe that it will bring significant improvements to the educational process and in the fight against school failure and dropout», illustrated the administrator of Altice.
What is at stake, said António Pina, is "a new world in the way of teaching". This is because, with this solution, students now have access to teaching software from Altice partners.
“There is an associated package here, which includes not only the tablet, but also Porto Editora's virtual school platform, as well as something very important: a security software component,” said Alexandre Fonseca.
This last component is provided by Samsung, the brand of tablets to be delivered to students and teachers and «guarantees protection mechanisms for children and young people who will use these devices».
Another advantage of using these electronic tools is that backpacks start to weigh much less.
“The manuals are already offered by the Government. But all manuals have an associated code, which allows them to be downloaded and used in a dematerialized form. Students continue to have their books on paper, they will have both», said António Pina.
In other words, students will not have to take the manuals to school as they can be “downloaded onto the tablets”.
Photos: Hugo Rodrigues|Sul Informação – Chamber of Olhão
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