Allow SHS students to use mobile phones on campus — Prof. Haruna
The Vice Chancellor of the University for Development Studies (UDS), Professor Yakubu Haruna, has advised heads of senior high schools (SHSs) to allow students to use mobile phones while on campus.
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According to him, mobile phones could be used positively to facilitate teaching and learning and enhance academic work.
“I entreat you to look for additional innovative ways to help students use the mobile phone while on campus for academic purposes”, he stated.
Prof. Haruna was speaking at the 53rd annual Conference of Heads of Assisted Secondary Schools (CHASS) in Tamale in the Northern Region.
It was on the theme: “Mitigating the challenges of school administration today, the role of stakeholders.”
Monitoring
Prof. Haruna said the heads of schools could forge partnership with the mobile phone service providers to enable them to monitor how the students used the phones while on campus.
He said in the era of increasing dominance of a globalised digital culture through the mainstreaming of social media, managing a new “smart generation of students” required the collective and concerted efforts of all stakeholders.
According to Prof. Haruna, the GES’s restrictions on the use of mobile phone by students in school could be reviewed to enable students to take advantage of the technology.
“As you meet today, let me call on CHASS members to deliberate and make recommendations on reforming the GES directive on mobile phone use on campus,” he said.
He, however, entreated teachers to keep themselves updated on current technologies so that they can effectively control the use of such technologies by students.
ICT teachers trained
In her address, the Minister of Education, Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang said so far more than 31,000 teachers had been trained in the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) across the country.
She said the rationale behind the training was to encourage teachers to be conversant with the use of modern technologies in teaching ICT.
Mathematics and science
Prof. Opoku-Agyemang expressed unhappiness about what she described as the lack of enthusiasm among students for the study of mathematics and science subjects, pointing out that teachers ought to find innovative ways to teach the subjects to make them more interesting for their students.
The newly elected President of CHASS, Mrs Cecilia Kwakye Coffie, said the delay in the payment of absorbed fees and feeding grants by the government was a major challenge for the heads of second-cycle institutions in the country.
According to her, for more than two terms, the absorbed fees had not been paid by the government. She suggested that if the authorities were finding it difficult to pay the absorbed fees to the schools, then a decision should be taken to include these items on students’ bills as was the case in the past.
Levies and meters
Mrs Coffie, who is also the headmistress of Winneba Senior High School appealed to the government to decentralise the approval of levies in schools to district directors of education.
According to her, the situation where only the Director General of GES approved all levies for all schools across the country created a lot of inconvenience for some schools, especially those in the remote areas.
She also appealed to the government to direct the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) to replace all the commercial meters installed in some SHSs with residential meters since the schools were not commercial entities.
The chairman for the occasion, Ambassador Abdulai Yakubu, the chief of Sagnarigu, called on stakeholders to provide the needed support to the heads of institutions to enable them to work effectively.