The school system in Kazakhstan is ready to ensure that 100% textbooks are in the digital form by the 2024. The announcement was made by the Minister of Education of Kazakhstan Gani Beisembayev, and carried by several media outlets including Kazinform.
At present, 79% of the textbooks are in the digitized form.
“11 publishing houses of the country are involved in the development of digital textbooks. In order to introduce innovative methods of teaching disciplines, methodological recommendations have been developed for use by teachers and their training is planned this year,” Gani Beisembaev said.
“Along with digital textbooks, schools actively use digital educational resources as additional educational material with multimedia content. More than 50 thousand digital educational resources have been created. Since the beginning of this year, 6.7 thousand schools have been connected to the CECs. Every day, 3 million students and teachers connect to the CECs,” added Gani Beisembaev.
DERs (Digital Electronic Resources) is a general description to refer to any teaching aid or material that was either created electronically or converted from the analog to the digital form. It can be used either on a multipurpose device such as a smartphone, tablet, laptop or a dedicated device like a reader.
DERs can be interactive, simulated, or inert.
For the students it can be convenient that all the DERs can possibly be carried in a single device.
For both the students and the teachers it can be useful that the DERs can be connected to the teacher’s dashboard and the classroom interactive board.
If the software includes the provision to record the lecture in a live mode and connect it to the relevant chapter or lesson in the DER, it will free the students to listen attentively to the teacher during the lesson instead of worrying about taking the notes.
The question remains whether we are depriving the students of something if we remove all of the traditional textbook from the classroom. /// nCa, 7 March 2023