 Education. It's the shared answer to so many of society's most urgent questions. How do we expand the horizons of our children? Multiply their dreams. Enlarge the scope of their opportunities in a way that builds a brighter future. How do we help them meet the broad range of global challenges they'll face in the decades ahead? Equip them with 21st century skills needed to succeed in today's competitive digital economy. Education is the answer to so many questions, but providing it raises so many others. Like how do we best harness the power of technology to improve the reach and effectiveness of education efforts worldwide? How do we orchestrate the professional development of tens of millions of educators around the planet? How can students, teachers, governments and industry all work together to develop truly sustainable change in our global education models? How can we create vibrant productive learning environments that will enrich the lives of every student on Earth? We know education is the answer, which means there's really only one question that matters. How do we make it happen? My privilege and my honor to be here today moderating this panel. I'm truly excited for your participation in terms of your attendance. I'm looking forward for all of you engaging, asking questions, bringing topics. This is a panel where we are here to learn from each other. My role at Intel is to work with organizations, governments, private and public sectors to help drive education initiatives in countries. I've had the privilege to visit over 90 countries, be witness to over 350 programs. So I come today to you not as an expert in education, but as a witness to experts. And what I have found in my travels that to really have a true transformational project, you need to have a vision. But beyond having a vision, you need to have the commitment, the collaboration and a community behind it to really help drive transformation, to really help bring change, to really engage teachers and empower children in the love of learning. In my experience, it also takes something that the four panelists here with me have in abundance. It takes courage. One of the things that I have learned in many of the discussions that I have had with those of you that take on this challenge of transforming education is that it is a lot easier to not do it than to do it. That the moment you start planning, people will have three reasons why we're not ready. It also requires investment. There was an excellent presentation earlier today. I hope some of you have attended. We have on the panel the moderator. It was excellent because it talked about vision and commitment. It talked about looking at education investments as a long term, not just a short term. It talked about education investments not about the next election, but for the next generation of youth in the country. I want to go back here to a quote from Mr. Mandela that we all know and we understand the power of education and the change that it can bring. But we also recognize that the state of global education is in a very difficult state. If I may quote from UNESCO, over 31 million primary school children drop out. It's a big number. 61 million children of primary age are not even enrolled. And the problem is even worse in rural areas. So although we talk about hope when we see videos and we talk about hope when we discuss vision, it really takes commitment from leadership to get action going in countries. And to that effect, I am so delighted with the panel that I am blessed here to present with you all. First of all, I have here to my right, His Excellency Nicholas Senawi, Minister of Telecommunications of Lebanon. And at the other end we have Mario Coronado from Fundación Telefonica. I have next to me on my left, His Excellency, Professor Marava, Minister of Communication Science and Technology of Tanzania. To the lights, sir, to have you here. Thank you. And as I said, I'm extra fortunate today that I have with me Professor Tim Unwin. In his work in Secretary General of Commonwealth of Telecommunication Organization, he's done a lot of work in education. I count on him to help me moderate the panel since I've seen him do it so beautifully a few minutes ago. What I'd like to do is first, as I said, take a moment to recognize that the situation globally for education is difficult. The opportunity for change is now. We cannot lose the opportunity. And we have seen from the projects that the gentlemen that are going to speak to us about have done in their countries are at the beginning of the beginning. I would not say people ask me, Brian, you travel so much, you see so many projects. Can you name two or three that are, you know, really standing out as the role model? I think the role model is those that have the courage to try. I think the role model are those that learn from each other. I think the role model are these gentlemen on this panel that today are going to share their views, their visions, and most importantly, concrete actions that they're taking to make transformation happen in their countries. I'll ask them to please take a few minutes to talk about their projects, and then we're going to engage in further discussion around that. Your Excellency, Minister of Telecommunications from Lebanon, will you please start? Thank you for having us. Good morning, everyone. Well, the project we initiated in Lebanon, in fact, it started with an objective, two objectives, in fact. One is the dream of having schools go to, the students go to school without the heavy box of books and everything, and instead having a tablet which is much easier. And the second thing was that the new generation of kids, and especially those with low revenue parents, would have access to this new wonderful tool that is the tablet that maybe our kids, we see them growing and learning very easily to use the tablet when they are very young. And we know that other low-end revenues, maybe until 18 years and even university, they cannot access these new tools. So this was the dream, let's say, of equipping the whole generation with these new tools, knowing that it's not easy, the budget is not there because we have budgets constraints as a government, etc. So a lot of challenges along the way to this dream, there was a lot of challenges. One of them being the educational system has to be able to absorb these changes. The teachers have to adapt to this new technology. The way of teaching has to change. We need connectivity in all schools which is not secured. Anyway, on the fixed network in Lebanon it was not secured. We had connectivity on the mobile network because we have now 3G all over Lebanon. So we had to adapt also the specs of the tablet to the situation we have on the ground. So having all these constraints, we came up with the first phase which is a commercial approach, not a governmental educational approach, a commercial approach where we have the 3G subsidized, we have the banking interests free, and we had an affordable tablet that we designed together with a vendor to have proper security and proper cloud access. And then we made a bid to have the lower cost possible tablet in 10 won the bid. And now we have a commercial offering that is very accessible, high value at the lower possible cost, that is already available one year after we launch the project. It's already available for parents to give to their children. And we coupled this with a pilot phase on the educational system, 500 free tablets for the Ministry of Education so that they can start preparing the schools, the school system, start training the teachers and make a pilot phase on full school year so that maybe in the next budget year we can then hope to purchase it on a larger scale for the school system if the school system has adapted itself. So we run it in parallel, the educational system has a slower pace, the commercial approach is much faster, but at least the ecosystem is starting to build. We have job creation because one of the bid conditions that you have to assemble in Lebanon, the tablets, and a lot of people from the new generation are going to be able to access this new technology and start adapting to it. Excellent, excellent, very good. Your Excellency, being a professor, I know education is very near to you. Also you talked about some of your projects when you and I spoke yesterday and the vision and the commitment that you've seen in your country to drive these types of programs. Can you share a little bit with us? Yes, please, thank you very much for giving me this opportunity. As you know, every country in this world tries to improve the education system, whether the country is in Africa, whether the country is in Latin America, whether the country is in Europe, anywhere. Those who try to improve, they want to look at the best result of the education system. Like Tanzania, we've got a number of problems, especially in education system, and we want to find a solution. There's a number of solutions from ICT solutions and other solutions from teaching point of view. But as you know that Tanzania, we have got around 7.9 million students at primary schools and 166,000 teachers. We've got a ratio of about 48.2 for one teacher. 48 students for one teacher is a very big number. And most of those schools are located in rural areas. And some of our teachers are not happy to go there due to the difficult conditions. So here the government decided to come up with a number of initiatives in order to solve these problems. And from the government perspective, we decided to solve this problem by using ICT, as a one among the two to solve this problem. So before doing that, the government decided to build the national infrastructure because if you want to use ICT, you need to have a backbone which help you to deliver the content or to deliver any service, whether it's e-service, whether it's education or anything. So we decided to build that and we're building around 7,850 kilometers of national ICT backbone where it has been connected to each of our regions. And soon we're going to our districts. We want to make sure that all our schools should be connected to the national ICT backbone. Also we've got a project where we have got a free bandwidth capacity. We're going to distribute to school and hospital. The government bought that bandwidth and capacity in order to give the service to the school and hospital and other government services. That is in a place. Another thing which we've done before going to do this connectivity is to educate teachers because from the morning panel we've seen that teacher education is very, very, very important. I have experienced some of my cases. The school has been given computer, have given everything, but people they are not willing to the facility. So first we decided to educate teacher in order to understand how to use facility. They need to be afraid. There's no need to be afraid of this equipment. Then from that point of view we have got two main project is going on in the country. The first one or main project we call Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow. Means what we want to do is using a technology to improve the education. So here we've decided to connect a number of schools. Some of them will be connected to national ICT backbone and some will be connected through the towers using 3G system. And the interesting thing here we have come up together with private sector. Tanzania which we call Vodacom Foundation has come up together. We agree that we need to connect using their site a number of schools. Also in those rural area where they have no electricity but Vodacom has got a tower and using generator we can use the electricity to power the school and also to power ICT labs. So this project is going on and we expect end of this year we should be able to connect around I think 400 schools with Vodacom together. Then from there there's another project which is working very closely with ITU. Also we call E-School Connectivity where we've got a special project to connect with ICTU with ITU to different schools of Tanzania. But we have done that. There's a number of challenges. The biggest challenge you are facing now is content. Content is a big problem. I think it's not good if we can... There's a lot of content maybe internationally we can take it but we want content which really reflect Tanzania perspective. We can't just take content from Kenya or from other countries. We need to have our own content. So this is a big challenge. Again with the private sector we have managed to change or to convert our content from normal process to digital using with the help of Vodacom and the other private sector and I'm sure soon we're going to do for science subject. Now we have done for art subject then we're going for science subject. Another challenge we are facing is definitely connectivity especially in rural areas. In some areas we haven't got... Remember the Tanzania population is very big and we've got area around 947 square kilometers. It's a vast country. So some area we have got a big problem even of voice connectivity, mobile phone. So those areas I think is going to be a big challenge because you see you have got a village here maybe you have got 200 people, there are 200 people, there are 300 people. So it's becoming more difficult but we try to see if maybe we can use connectivity using satellite or other technology in order we can speed the process as soon as possible. Thank you very much. Interesting and we'll have more discussion about the role of the teachers and how we engage them. So I want to hear from all the panelists. Sounds like you have obviously done that. Also the area of content. There's going to be actually a panel later on today that's going to get focused on content and I recommend that you look at that also but we'll discuss it more with the rest of the folks on the panel. Maria I want to come to you now. You know obviously I know Telefonica from a lot of different personal experience having lived in Madrid for a number of years and traveled in Latin America and Telefonica and the work you're doing you're very much involved in education and healthcare. First of all tell me why and then tell us a little bit about it. Good morning everyone. It's an honor to be here thank you. Telefonica as a group has always been looking at the fact that in order to be successful as a company we need for the countries to be successful and everywhere definitely the key issue for development is education. We're centered in three different issues. The first one is reduction of child labor when we've engaged in Latin America with governments and directly with kids in schools to try and help reduce this problem because we think it's a key issue to be able to have a good education. We're working with about 300,000 kids in Latin America of those about 45,000 in Peru helping them go to school and helping them get a good education in those schools. We're also engaged directly in school innovation education innovation through three different programs. One is Aulas Fundación Telefonica which is just classrooms with all the capabilities to access the internet but more importantly program for the development of the teachers. We believe that the engagement of the teacher is key for this to happen. Our ratio of kids to computers still quite high and we think that in this phase of the development of ICT in Peru and Latin America in general it's more important to get the teachers to be engaged in a process of development and usually ICT is key in getting their incentives and getting their motivation going to be involved. Usually in this space we work in basically four sections. One is develop a good leader in the school, directly in the school. Second, having content for the teachers to engage and get the teachers to develop their own content and to share them among them. Third, we need to generate incentives for them. Not only it's not an issue of money necessarily it's an issue of recognition. They need to feel recognized and we have developed a platform that allows them to share what they do and be incentivized for sharing that and that has helped a lot to mobilize about 3,500 teachers in 45 schools in rural areas, in urban areas but mostly poor areas. This has worked in our advantage and the kids' advantage. We're starting to see some good results with a particular reduction of absenteeism and reduction of dropouts and we didn't intend to get better results in math and reading tests but we're getting much better results in those schools than others. We're also applying this model to hospitals. Hospitals where kids are staying for a long time also require access to education and with computers and books and games and specialized teachers we're trying to reach these kids and help them realize how important education is for them and they're finding education not only a space for themselves but this possibility of opening up alternatives access to the computer, access to several things and third, we have developed actually it's kind of a social network for teachers that helps all teachers in the country access different content that can help them in their schoolwork in general For example, we have developed content for school directors with UNESCO We have developed a program that is virtual and real in a way It's a small class for about a week with teachers from a particular place 100 and 120 teachers and then we give them about 80 hours in the virtual world to develop more of the knowledge that they have gotten that week and we have gotten really good results with that We've already reached about 5,000 teachers in the whole country through this model the mixed model being present and being virtual at the same time We think that this network of alliances that has been shown through this webpage through this social network really allows teachers to reach each other and to help each other to develop new content Those are basically the three main thrusts that we're heading in education in Latin America Also, we have a third subject which is the development of a digital culture This space where art and education and science get together This space where there's a lot of creativity especially where the young people really engage in finding out what is digital and what is the internet and what is all this from the perspective of their own interest Just being able to explore new things and being able to go further than before For example, one of the biggest hits is The anime and all this animation that we see The kids are really involved in that and usually allows for their creativity to just bloom, you know Excellent Professor Unwin You've been an advocate for education in a number of roles You've probably seen as I have too that there's been a lot of talk and there's been some action Obviously we see some great examples here on the panel But what can you offer us in terms of your perspective of what do we have to do to really get to that next step Maybe what's the first step that you see when you see a country successfully using technology in a form that's going to help education and engage students and bring teachers into the fold Thank you very much, Brian It's such a privilege that you've invited me to be part of this session Seeing that slide up there has maybe changed what I was going to say completely and just tell you a little story about why I am where I am now and begging begging you to join me on this journey More than a decade ago I was in an African country and met a charismatic minister of employment She said, Tim You know the biggest problem we face and she said it's vocational and technical education It's about skills development and entrepreneurship We're the Cinderella And I note your figures there 61 million children not in school 31 million primary school children dropping out and boys most likely to drop out So the initiative that I would just like you to take away is what comes out of that I had the privilege more than a decade ago of leading our prime ministers in Fundo initiative in Africa which was partnerships for ICT in education and that's when I first got to know Intel and some of the wonderful work you're doing And I took that minister's thought and decided that we were going to work with what people variously call street children or out of school youth and in Ethiopia and we did it in partnership with civil society again that's really important we hear too much about public-private not multi-stakehold of involved civil society international organisations as well and we helped them develop a curriculum in local languages for non-formal education and people who were living and working on the street began to get skills that they could use to do things differently and we were working with girls groups and I don't mean to cause offence by this but there were civil society organisations there who were giving young women shoe shine kits so they didn't have to sell their bodies to earn money to work and we were giving them technical skills and that they could use those to gain a different kind of employment and then I had the privilege of working with a, is anyone from the Philippines here but a wonderful program called Esquela in the Philippines if you don't have a school-leaving certificate you cannot get a job so all those children who were dropping out of school or who had to live at home to support their parents because they were ill or anyway these children couldn't get a job so how can they get a school-leaving certificate and government together with civil society and we were involved in it helped develop a curriculum in local language for them to get the skills and the exams they could get employment and so my challenge for us all is how can we use this kit to serve almost marginalised people because if we don't political tensions are going to rise if we don't they're going to be a drain on the economy rather than a contribution to the economy and so when I was asked two years ago to lead the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation I said let's not try and do everything let's do a few things really well and actually in our strategic plan even though I am committed to education we didn't have education there because there are so many other people doing ICT for education really really well but the chair of our council the elite Fioratunga from Sri Lanka said Tim you have to have ICT for education so I said well what and within that thank you very much on how we can use skills developed in entrepreneurship across the spectrum but particularly for those who haven't had the privilege of being able to be at school and in that connection looking and turning to the Caribbean and Latin America I would just like to pay tribute to the wonderful work of the Fundación El Mardengo in Costa Rica who developed a program to help young out-of-school people to get the skills through ICTs that they need to get gainful employment and so what we're trying to do and it is slow and we're not making as much progress as I would like I'm desperately impatient but in the Caribbean and with another hat on I know in the Caribbean actually women who succeed in education and it's the men who as you note here many young men drop out so we're trying to develop a program that can give young men skills through the use of ICTs and the High Commissioner and Belize again inspired me to commit to this and colleagues in Trinidad and Jamaica as well that we can use the experience of the Fundación to give these young men skills that will enable them not to have a life of crime and guns and drugs on the streets but can be gainfully employed can contribute to their societies and can be part of this community of those who have the privilege of using ICTs to support their learning so that is where the CTO is at the moment in this area working on skills development and entrepreneurship trying to contribute for the most marginalized with the most marginalized putting computers into schools is easy I invite you to join me in working with those who don't even have the privilege of going to school thank you Brian we've heard some of the their programs and we've also started to surface some of the challenges someone who was going to be with us today but could not join is Alicia Vannuelos she is a fantastic individual that has done amazing work for education in her country of Argentina and she's been a mentor to me in terms of really understanding what it takes to move forward in these types of programs and one of the things that I learned from her and she's a principal at a university and she's kind of the leader thought leader in this role is that many times the teachers are not going to be the first ones to try to bring in some of this change especially when it's about bringing in technology into the classroom and it's not so much because they're against it but it is a new area for them and they have other concerns too and many times she explained to me that the ministries of education don't have most of their budget which is like this like this much of it is on salaries and administrative costs and things that they need to move these things forward in terms of what's happening in the current system in the school. She shared with me an anecdote that she uses is that when you bring a computer to the school the teachers are excited when you bring in a computer into the classroom they're delighted when every child in their class has a computer they're terrified and that was her perspective and we have to change that you know show me a great student and I'll show you an amazing teacher we all have them but there is a movement that we really need to focus on the professional development of teachers not so they go to learn how the computer works but how they engage the children in the love of learning in topics that they're experts on using technology to help transform because you know our kids face in my opinion another digital divide if you will which is they may or may not have a device but do they know what to do with it in a form that's going to lead towards employability that's going to lead to job creation that it's really going to enrich their life so the teachers have a fundamental role to play and we've heard from the minister in Tanzania the work that he's doing with the teachers already I want to turn it around to your Excellency in terms of the work in Lebanon that you're doing you're bringing in tablets which are cool you're bringing in technology which the kids get it right away don't they but how about the teachers exactly what when you said they were terrified of the prospect of having all the classroom every kid equipped with a PC they are less terrified of every kid having a tablet because by definition the tablet makes a friendly user because you don't have the computer is more complex with programming the apps when you access an app it's already there's a lot of effort that has been done creating the app to make it easier to go through so the tablet is a tool that is more friendly user than the PC so this is one step towards having the teachers accept this technology change of the educational system so I believe the tablet is a better tool for classrooms the second thing is I'm minister of telecommunication not minister of education so my perspective my approach is more how to get the whole country upgraded in terms of connectivity in terms of bandwidth in terms of technology generation and this has been the main focus of my mandate when I took office they were out of 4 million Lebanese there were 200,000 who had fixed internet legal fixed internet maybe 200,000 illegal fixed internet that's 400,000 that's 10% connectivity and we had like 200,000 with gprs the 2G connectivity through the mobile network so it's about 12% 13% of the Lebanese population had connectivity the rest had no connectivity now we are at 2.5 million in 2 years that has either 3G or DSL so we upgraded the whole country in terms of connectivity that's not educational per se but that's democratization of the access and of the the new technologies and the familiarization of every household and probably every kid with the internet the program we did with the ministry of education in collaboration with the ministry of education was as I explained two parallel tracks one for the ministry and one for the commercial approach and I think it's a success because we were able to get there in one year whereas a normal track would take 2 to 3 to 4 years depending on the difficulties that's my take on it excellent Mario I would like you to maybe expand a little bit also on your working with teachers and I know that in some cases a lot of the technology you're bringing it where they don't have teachers you're bringing it into hospitals and you're bringing it into a virtual classroom but what do you see as you work in your line of work in the education system especially in Peru that's launching some new programs how do we get the teachers engaged what do you see the private sector maybe doing to help that let me take one step behind the first thing is we need to realize that all actors all actors need to be involved in education as a nation we need to be involved in education and that involves businesses involves civil society in general the government and all the actors that want to be there especially the parents and everybody that is around for this to one of the keys is for government to realize that obviously they do have the leadership they do have the mandate the ministry of education whatever position they have in government but at some point we need to as we say in Spanish trazar la cancha just draw the field we need to draw the lines in the football field to make sure where everybody lays and what the roles are and that's one of the first things we need to do and we have at some point sat down with the ministry of education and talked about what is the role of business in this process and we have talked about the possibility of helping develop ways to improve education in kind of a way of a social venture capital just trying to establish how to develop this experiences that then can be used to help others to be rolled out in different space as businesses we bring to key things one is the possibility of developing these new projects developing new ideas and implementing them and second there is a huge expertise in rolling out in implementing systems throughout countries sometimes we we think that implementing these programs can be easy it's not I mean the implementation it's an issue by itself and it's huge from there I would like to say that engaging teachers they first have to recognize you as a valid person as a valid entity to talk to and given the alliances we have developed with the government and with civil society with other businesses we have developed this relationship with the teachers in different spaces and this relationship has to do with creating incentives showing them that it can be done and creating the spaces for them to develop and the incentives come as an additional and as I said before the incentives is not money is not trips it's education it's recognition it's helping them realize how much impact they can have in people lives and in schools we have really focused on trying to get the teachers to first realize that the technology by itself is not going to make it for the kids it's right every teacher every part of the world is scared when all kids have computers I mean we have set up computers in different places in different countries we're talking about 45 schools in particular and pretty much every time we go there the first time the kids sit down to the computer you'll have in about 10 to 15 minutes they'll be playing all of them no exceptions but if you put 20 teachers in the same place you probably have 5 that are lead users and they're already checking their email and they're just bored they have about 10 that probably like what they're doing they're starting to learn and they see a possibility but then you have 5 that they think that the mouse is going to jump and bite them and we're talking mouse and not tablets but at the same time it is an issue I mean teachers have a hard time first dealing with the technology but then they don't have a value because the problem is the teacher thinks that because they don't know technology they don't have a value as a teacher and the first thing for us was to tell them hey every kid needs to learn how to live in order to know how to live he needs to recognize patterns he needs to look at experience in a different way he needs to learn how to learn and those things are something that you can teach them on the computer now but you know more about living and about thinking about analyzing and synthesizing about collaborating about all sort of things that they need so putting things in perspective for them not to be so scared is one of the first things we did when we got there then giving them opportunities and the other end is they also need to recognize the richest kids in ways that nothing else can just try I'm going to try and tell you a story the first time I went to one of these hospital classrooms we went to Ocusco which is a city in the Andes the old capital of the Inca empire and there was there's a clinic there where they take most of the disability kids kids that have some kind of disability and unfortunately in our country still in this era there's a lot of birds that are not handled properly and unfortunately kids don't have enough oxygen and they end up with several pulsing cerebral brain paralysis whatever you want to call it and there are certain cases where the people in the Andes the farmers don't have the possibility of dealing with a kid so they basically take the kid to the hospital and drop it there they think it's a vegetable because they haven't been able to communicate with a kid ever and then the parents go away and come back in three months and suddenly the kid is talking to them through the computer the teacher has helped the kid realize which part of their body they can move they have shown them how to use a software that allows them to pick icons in the screen and use those icons to form sentences and the computer translate that sentence into something like a voice that can be heard by somebody that is close to them can you imagine the impact in that kids and that family's life can you imagine the impact in the teacher to feel that they can impact their kids' life so ICT has a profound effect in kids' lives it has a profound effect in teacher's life but in order for that to happen we need to engage the teacher in the most basic which is their need to impact the kids to give them those tools that they need to impact the kids Thank you Mario Your Excellency I want to take it one level up In your role how do you get the ministers of education with you on this because again I go back to most of the transformational projects that I've seen named Peru and also in Portugal and in Panama and Argentina have been led through a private partnership public partnership that's been driven by everyone but the ministries of education initially to get started once it gets going everybody loves a great situation and they will join in and add to it tremendously but how do we get that how did you create that partnership with your ministries of education First I think we need to understand that I'm a minister minister of education also is a cabinet minister is a government working in the team it's quite important that and whenever we've got a problem especially for ICT I need to sit down with him I know he has got a lot of responsibility with those passing grade drop out but for me I want to help education sector to improve the passing grade so it's always I try to have a meeting joint meeting maybe using video conference or sit down together with the minister of education to see the way forward how we can take this project Tanzania build tomorrow I can give an example three days ago our vice president call us myself and minister of education to discuss together the way forward how we going to take technology to improve the passing grade of our students because there's a big big problem of passing grade nowadays so he say this is a challenge you guys together you need to come up with a solution for me as a cabinet minister always I go to the minister of education to put my hands in order to get things done I know if we're going to change the passing rate using ICT the credit will come to me as a minister for communication science and technology I use him just as a platform but end of the day I'm going to jump the credit so it's very important to work as a team here as a minister as a government this is quite important so we have no problem and I'm sure we will never achieve anything with ICT in education without ministry of education that is a no otherwise we can't go anywhere definitely a win-win situation where you can really get to explain and to engage with the minister so they can see that this is about raising as you said excellence the competitiveness of the country not just within the school system and what we have found in deployment such as yours it's not about what happens in the classroom it's outside the classroom in many cases the device to tablet that they will get is the first computing device that they may have at home and we have found that it's the younger brother teaching the older brother that the sister teaches them both eventually when she gets her hands on it and that whole kind of bonding that happens because really it's about a community of learning I want to turn it over to the audience for some questions from them if there are some if not I have many more but before I do that Professor Unwin anything on that whole area of challenge of the teachers that you want to bring up I want to hear from the audience a quick quick I'd first like to thank Mario for bringing up disability children with disabilities have far more to gain than the rest of us in the use of ICTs but very briefly I'm going to be provocative so maybe get some reaction I don't think this issue around teachers is really anything to do with the technology it's shifting the mindset from traditional didactic to constructivist models of learning so it's not the teacher you do this you do this it's actually the teacher being down here listening to the needs of the people and serving that and that's a huge huge conceptual shift until we get that right no amount of technology is going to make a difference secondly I think we have to pay teachers decently in many of the countries where I work teachers have three or four jobs just to keep their households going how are they time to invest learning computer skills and if they do they'll get them and then go and earn jobs outside teaching I think a third point and I wrote about this a decade ago and it's still the same now we talk about ICT in schools computers in schools projects we don't talk about computers in teacher training projects I would like a situation where we get rid of all computers in schools initiatives and in most countries I work in do not have an integrated computer's ICTs for teacher learning in them any country here stand up and say yes we actually have that and this is really important because most programs not all but a huge number it's about giving them wait for it giving teachers what am I going to say it's giving teachers office skills be it Microsoft office or open office or whatever it's office it's not education so many programs I go to it's a word processing package it's a spreadsheet package it's a presentation package that's nothing I don't think to do with learning and it's actually how we use ICTs in an integrated way in their diversity to support teachers own learning and then that they can share that with the young people and not so young people who they're helping to learn so my plea is let's get rid of ICTs in schools project let's every country have an integrated ICT for teacher training that's building an integrated package in all teacher training colleges it's pre school it's in school I work in countries that have tens of thousands of teachers who have no qualifications at all if we don't start there if we don't enable them to learn how to support young people appropriately and give them the salaries to do it we're going to get nowhere thank you I said I'll be provocative thank you very very good well I want to see from the audience if we have some questions and happy to get this exchange going how do we do with the microphones our friends coming with a microphone we have a gentleman here in the first row over here and then we'll walk work our way this gentleman right there in the corner please take your name Mustafa from Sudan government thank you very much chairman and thank you for the panelist and I would like again to raise a point which I tried to raise it in the morning session but it might be I failed to explain it well but professor Tim and Mario I think they start to touch on that issue you see and how about we use the multimedia and mainly the ICT in education how could you make the best impact in improving the efficiency of education because some people all like myself in the thickest they might remember we have like the mobile cinema so where the government they have the car with the generator and then they use these films very structure to teach the population especially the rural population about the health and irrigation improvement of agriculture and so different materials they needed on those area then later on it came the cinema and then it came the television and then remember when I was in secondary school we have the English teach lessons through the television stations where every secondary school I mean the classroom there is certain time the teachers start making these training which feels different from the classical using the books and the format grammar and so on and there is a achievement and improvement in the efficiency and so on and now are we going to repeat using the computer as films making programs where the students sit in front of the computer and see programs it will be very boring see right and we think there should be a way where these computer because there is an interaction where Mario said about the handicapped children there was immediate impact you can see the impact because there was interaction and where the computer real played a role in bringing up the education of non-educatable person but now how can we do something for the masses to change the instructions I think that's a great question I think it has tones of also to do with content and I think if I may summarize what you really want is kids that not only consume but get in that creation space not only play angry birds learn about the birds right we need to go to there and maybe I'll turn it to you minister in terms of what you're doing now that you're bringing in these tablets and maybe the role of interactive multimedia content and so forth well we have these tablets are linked to a cloud and both operators they are sold by the local operators which are government owned and these operators are developing a cloud solution which is a local app store encouraging Lebanese creators inventors to developers to put the application on the local cloud and these applications together with Intel in fact we're going to do a workshop and encourage an ecosystem to thrive and push most of these new apps which are related to educational culture something that is useful to the kids push them on the tablets that are being sold through this program so that they can have a environment to benefit from this is the solution we are working on. If I may add on that myself a lot of the very successful starts of programs have to do with allowing for local content creation and for example in Argentina what I saw was that the university students were being trained to build content interactive fun exciting content for the younger kids so they were actually gaining a skill and also providing a service so that interaction and having higher education play a role and if I may maybe Your Excellency if you want to add to that Mr. Mustafa maybe there is another thing take example for experiment chemistry experiments on the lab normally in our cases especially in our school you need to buy chemicals give student chemical do the experiment but if you have got a computer model of content you repeat that experiment ten five times before the student go to the lab so you can put you can add the chemicals and you can see the reaction on the computer then you can get a feeling before you go to the lab when you go to the lab you don't need to repeat many times because you know what you expect from the computer lab so computer can help a lot to do that type of things and for a lot of money especially to buy reagents and other things You want to take an answer of that real quick Please a quick step at two things first I'm not sure if understood well the question but I think that media in general also have a role I mean we were talking about a nation being preoccupied with education I think we all do a nation have an important the media have an important role I mean there's TV stations around the world that have developed great educational content that is that is put in prime time everyday and I think that's one of the issues that have to be involved second and last is when you allow teachers to use the technology and give them the tools they'll find ways and they'll share it give you an example there's a teacher in a very small town in northern Peru they just want a price from us because he developed a whole system to get the kids to learn about their own identity they had to take interviews from their parents and uncles and aunts and grandparents to learn how this town was created what happened in the last 20 years 50 years or whatever so before in school the guy that knew everything about ICT was the ICT teacher the history guys and the whatever literature guys the ones that are really generating content because those are the ones that are really engaging the kids in new ways because in order to learn more about geography they just go and take the picture and show it and I think that's a really good way to just let teachers find their own content and share it with the kids with other teachers I know there were a couple more questions here on the third row gentlemen right there thank you good morning my name is Samin Jua I'm with UNICEF and first of all I'd like to say it's been a very exciting I think and very pleasant set of discussions that have been led by the panel they're certainly very enlightening I'm trying to connect some of the dots between some of the sessions that's starting with the forum and some of the very high level technological pieces we saw with the 4G LTE things that are coming down the pipeline went to another session where there was broadband you know broadband and enriching everything and then coming back to internet of everything and then coming back now to this session I think which is really more down to the ground which is really about education and I think an area where through the starting of this we saw you know there's certain very key things about what we do with all of this technology and how then as partners as people having different roles we actually engage in it one of the things that caught me in one of the sessions yesterday was said you know looking at broadband and everything you've got the device you've got the pipe and you've got the cloud certainly what we're hearing part of this is also I think a lot of the technology part of the devices we're hearing a little bit about the pipe and that's the part I want to talk a little bit about we're looking about really looking at saying how do we get that access to many areas where we look at the real populations that actually need that access and granted yes their operators here their people who have got certainly very I think very noble very intricate interest in delivering and in seeing that the capability to deliver the technology is there through the connectivity somewhere I feel that with much of what we've got yes certainly I think there's good things being done but maybe we might need to explore a little bit more in terms of the innovation space of saying what about the spectrums that we've got because what we're saying is we have a lot of unused spectrum we have a lot of TV white space for example we don't hear enough about that in sessions like this to say let's bring down probably some of the capabilities that probably some of the things like TV white space could actually do to enable that connectivity and that further reach especially in much of the challenge areas in many parts of the world in Africa where I'm from for example in many other parts of the world where that would really provide additional capability power of course is another one because power generation we're looking at that reach as well and there again you know simple renewable energies whether it's solar power or wind based power which would then enable further to further reach to get that reach what I'd just like to therefore just throw a little bit into the discussion is really those two pieces one look at the power generation piece the second one is looking at that use of free of spectrum use of the forums such as we have here with ITU and the other partners in saying let's free up some of those other spectrum spaces that are capable to actually enable us to deliver that broadband type capability to actually enable us to enrich the capabilities that we've got thank you all right thank you you know one of the things that we heard yesterday was also in that light of you know everyone everywhere right having access so I think how we apply ICT technology to to to help drive that I'm going to rely a little bit on my experts that are here next to me to maybe address that who would like to please maybe I need to talk about Tanzania perspectives especially in the incoming issues spectrum there are two parts you mentioned about white spaces in Tanzania we have started to do some investigation to use white spaces now between Microsoft Hellaces company private company and Tanzania Tanzania Commission of Science and Technology Commission Kostek we're dealing to see how we can explore to you that white spaces for education purpose so this one is going on and the second part especially we try to optimize the spectrum to see how we can use those spectrum and as you know that Tanzania will switch off the digital television part of the Tanzania in order to get those spectrum where we can use it for education and especially for lifestyle connectivity otherwise we can do anywhere concerning the issue of electricity that is a big challenge especially rural areas and we try to talk with the private sectors especially Vodacom as I mentioned before that we need to use a system where they've got a power normal they have got a generator then we need to use that generator to power the school in order we can use that electricity to power the school to power ICT and other equipment on the school that's my comment thank you can I follow that and thank you because you've hit several nails very firmly on the head going back to how you get affordable internet it's absolutely fundamental and many of the countries I Sierra Leone has 1.6% internet connectivity at the moment going up and that is the reality of many of the countries in which I work so how do we resolve that and I think as I've said before it's trying to we've done the easy stuff let's now commit to working in the most difficult environment so what we've done is working with partners we've got Excel funding to help build up an integrated national broadband strategy I mean I think there are 14 Commonwealth countries I don't know globally but who still don't have a national broadband strategy in place such strategies it's not a matter of one size fits all it's an integrated strategy yes Australia's NBN has been very controversial but at least a principle behind it that you're going to need different solutions in different places is important so it's having that holistic vision and the commitment to deliver and how you pay for it in some very very poor countries is also a real challenge but I think that is where innovative regulatory models multi-stakeholder partnerships can make a difference on on on electricity again absolutely right but I think there are I'm more optimistic here I think there are more innovative local science coming up I mean there are some I'm a great believer in micro-hydro where you've got water much much more efficient than solar and there's some good examples from Sarawak and Malaysia where they're powering schools through micro-hydro to be able to use electricity the solar projects wind projects appropriate but I think we can also change the technologies so that are less power demanding I mean I'm going to do a bit of advertising now but you know I've just recently got a new MacBook Air and I can get 10-12 hours out of it and compared with the old MacBook Pro which I got one or two at best so you know things are moving in the right direction but there's much much more work to be done so yes and I just come back to my own country and to reinforce this point about the most marginalised 17% of households in the UK still do not have internet access and so what are the kids in those schools going to do so we hear a lot of good examples we hear a lot of success stories but I mean you're encouraging us to get real brother I'm with you on that journey Alright before Mario I think you had a point which is one very small point first I think that there's always new technologies to get more access but I think the key is remember hopefully no one was alive when this was invented you know Penn does everybody talk about this new technology well I hope sometime in the future we're not talking about the technology we'll be talking about how to teach what to teach what we want from the kids education and the real issue is we need the kids to learn we need to forget about we need for them to forget about that they're writing with a pen and they're using a towel or using a PC I think that's also an issue hopefully we'll have enough inclusion then to be able to forget about it Mario do you think we should be using the word learner rather than teacher more we should be moving away from education and talk more about learning and we need to recognize that I mean the model of the only one perfect leader I think has been just broken up and I think we all need to realize that we're learning from each other and there's a leader in the class that should lead the kids in the process of learning not a teacher that stands up and gives the rule absolutely there was a question yes sir you have the mic Rod Gruen Northern Cape Provincial Government Republic of South Africa thank you Mr. Gonzalez and your panel it's a lot of focus on the current condition and the challenges that we have are there good examples of the transformed teacher training college or the transformed BS education and of course at the other end the actual self-learning possibilities that are created through this multimedia technologies and good access and electricity you're looking to me I think we should point to some of the work that Rod's actually been doing I think in many of the poorer countries of the world where I work I come back to what I said earlier there are very very few examples of this being done well at an integrated way in teacher training I remember there's some one example I would give I don't know if there's anybody from China here but there was an internationally funded and supported program in the five western provinces in China there was an amazingly thoughtful Professor Bernadette Robinson I think it was who made the point there that it's fundamentally about enabling teachers to make transformation so what Mario's talking about and so although ICTs were integral to what was happening the focus wasn't on the ICTs it was about transforming learning and China does things at scale and very impressively and I think once you've made that first step in enabling teachers to have confidence and this was using television using in those days desktops and laptops but now across China every single secondary classroom is going to be fitted with whiteboards interactive whiteboards and they're not being used just as a slide show they are used interactively and I think that's because the focus started on supporting the teachers to have new ideas about what vision they could have to roll out learning it's not perfect everywhere but I would point to that as one example where the technology worked because it wasn't actually the technology that was at the forefront and I can give you the references to that later if you want Brian I think I'd like to tell you about our specific case we're a small country but we're ranked 12th as an educational system worldwide and fifth in mathematics and science to give you the challenges we face are not always the same challenges as in Africa or Latin America one of the things is that in spite of the fact that we have a great level of education we have unemployment a fair level of 20% unemployment and we have the other graduates when they graduate they leave the country to work abroad so we have two problems one is the kids that don't find unemployment and the second is the kids that find unemployment but not at home so they leave their families for many years and sometimes not to come back these are the challenges we face the ideas we came we found me and the minister of education and we worked together on was it's a video that's on the web that's being made by an association called Coding Association or something like that it's Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and all the major OTT players that made the video saying we need coders we need programmers so they say 5% of the jobs of the graduates are graduated in coding or programming whereas 70% of the new jobs created are for coders or programmers so there's a big unbalance so there's a need and we need to get the coding we need to teach coding in schools to get coding in schools not only in universities and this takes a big effort and takes an effort in equipping the schools so we go back to the same subject we were talking about but it goes also to the who's going to teach them how and what grades etc and we did an effort in Lebanon on that it's a small effort there's a new device Raspberry Pi which is really cheap it's 25 dollars it's a small box transparent 25 dollars if you add the keyboard and the charger and the screen maybe it will add up to 60-70 dollars and this is a really easy tool to work with and to get it so you have one with you that doesn't make my okay excellent Intel Galileo even better how much is it it's actually it's somewhere under 60 dollars and we have a program for universities that we are doing that I can talk to you after the panel but again it's the building block your Christmas present you know what it's coming but anyway I'll take it it is yours sir but the idea is to teach the kids in school to introduce coding classes in schools to prepare the kids to be able to find employment when they graduate and being as our country wants to be a digital hub in the region and we are doing everything we can to make the country ready for that this is even a more important to ask for us because we need engineers we need people to work in this digital hub we are creating so this is a challenge that is between education and telecommunication and digital economy you know I think it's been touched upon it's transformation is not so much about bringing the technology it's about changing the way kids learn or adapting the way that we teach I'm not sure which one is first but it has to change dramatically and I think that us as parents, uncles concerned citizens we have to work with those folks that now have that charter which is the ministries of education but the transformation doesn't happen there first and you know so this is my first time at ITU and I was so delighted to see so much talk about education because I was wondering you know and now I don't wonder anymore but it's the power that you all have that this panel shows to be able to make those changes I think we have one additional work on education and telecommunication I sent a letter recently to the minister of education asking him to amend the curricula of the telecommunication curriculum in universities because they are still teaching programs that are not used anymore or are obsolete and whereas there are a lot of new programs for mobile phones and smart phones application or for PCs that are needed so I thought at least if the minister of telecommunication can express its needs then the minister of education can have a list to work on and get it done what was the reply? it was one week ago where's the email? it's on the way questions request for Galileo no we'll take those later there's a question thank you thank you Mr. Fungu minister of communication Kurokawa and joined the others to thank the members of the panel I want to ask the panel from Lebanon an issue that I might clarify the lowering out of ITN technology education is something which we'd really like to take financing. Financing would be an issue and one would be to engage the private sector or providers and to join with the public who are concerned with education. And so I want to ask from him what challenges would that pose probably particularly in terms of aligning the technology because you are probably dealing with a particular type of, particularly the hardware part of it where you might really be talking about a certain type. I'm talking about this because as the Honorable Minister mentioned in Tanzania among the others which would not have had the time to say is engaging with a provider to put a tablet kind of technology which would be cheap and used but the challenge is it is a particular type. Are there some kind of regulatory or standardization or whatever issues coming from that point of view? I'm going to tell you the answer of how we did it but I'll tell you one thing I think our experience is not necessarily the same as in another country because we live in a very weird country where we have hundreds of thousands of problems you cannot imagine. For example, when we gave the 500 tablets for free to the Minister of Education to make a pilot phase on specific schools and classes he needed $250,000 to train the teachers which is a fairly small budget and my ministry is the second contributor to the Treasury in Lebanon we provide $2 billion per year to the Treasury. I said I'm sure I can find $250,000 to give them to you so we agreed we looked with the lawyers how to transfer the money from my ministry to his ministry and we find a very long and complex path that we followed to the end it reached the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Finance said I won't transfer the money I don't accept it. He said why? He said it's unconstitutional and this is a two year story, two years to get the $250,000 from my ministry to his ministry and the teachers are not yet trained so now we are trying to find some money from the private sector as a sponsoring or other type of... what we did is that we used the commercial arm of the Ministry of Telecommunication because we are the owner of the two mobile operators they are managed by the private sector but they are owned by the Ministry of Telecommunication but they are owned through commercial law entities they work under commercial laws so we were able to make the bid on the tablets to pay for the tablets but we went through a commercial approach where they will be sold to the public to the general public we went to the central bank they subsidized the interest so the interest free on a two year loan and we subsidized the 3G the 3G is at 50% or even 30% of the cost it would normally cost for the children and the tablet is cheaper because we made the bid because all the international vendors came and fought to get the deal so we have a very nice package but it's not for free and it's not mandatory so a student can buy it and another student will not buy it so it's not 100% democratic but it was a way forward in waiting for the Ministry of Education to prepare itself through the pilot phase waiting for the Lebanon government to accept to have a bigger budget to buy the tablets for a wider generation it's a first step on this road great, we have a few minutes left there's two ideas that come to mind that have been talked one in the last few days another one that may be new first one is I heard that in Colombia part of the money that was obtained for spectrum licenses was directly used in the program to buy tablets and give it to schools that was even better for the telecom industry because they were generating more clients at the end and it was good for the schools because they were getting the tablets directly without having to go through the whole problems of transferring money between ministries that's something that did it in Colombia I think it would be an interesting thing to look at and second in Peru, not in this subject but in another subject the government is working in trying to install spaces for kids for children between 0 and 5 year olds what they've done is that they've developed something like a module they've done all the design, they've done all the equipment design and everything is ready in a package and it's even priced and basically they've gone company by company saying if you want to do social responsibility here there's a plan for you to implement it cost, I don't know how it was but I think it was like $15,000 so it's like a small, instead of buying a campaign for whatever product you can do this and it's already designed, it's already set the government has set the standards and it's much easier for the companies to say okay I'll do one of these for that space where I operate there's a lot of mining companies that have bought into this project and have implemented these modules maybe you can do a module for ICT for example yeah Mario, an example of acquisition of technology for education through sales spectrum one example is Portugal and it's well documented and if anybody needs more information on that Dr. Mario Franco who's spoken at ITU in the past and other venues talks about that so the whole area, but after that it has to be sustainable so in these cases and I know in Lebanon the same case there's micro financing or some ways that the parents can sustain that I'm very familiar with a project in West Bank Palestine where the parents buy the devices for the kids and many times they may not use them in the school as much as they'll use them in the learning centers because that's where their education is happening not at the school and the learning center so again complicated situations so I think that there's a lot of creativity and there's a lot of programs already that have been started that I think could serve as a guiding light or a lighthouse for all of us in the last five minutes that I have I want to ask my distinguished and superb panel as you speak to your peers out there what are the one or two things that you can tell them in terms of what you would see if you were in their shoes and they're looking at starting a program what would be the one or two words of advice that you would give them and it can be courage or stay on it or whatever or it can be more specific and it's going to be like round robin because we have to be really quick on it but I'm going to start with you we'll go this way I'll start with that image that I was trying to put at the beginning draw the lines of the field sit down with all the players and say okay this is my role, this is your role what are the spaces we can move in and let's commit all of us to work for education in our country I think that's the first move and the second is that there's a lot of teachers that are doing great job today in our country what we need is to help those that do the good job be able to tell everybody else how to do it and to feel that they're recognized for that good job they're doing So Maria, yes sir Well I would say the future is in ICT there's as much money as a government would invest in equipping generation with new technology new tools, new educational system I think the money is invested in the right place and I wouldn't spare any budget towards that goal and I totally agree that building self-confidence is very important and success stories are there I'm sure in any country just have to be exposed and communicated to everybody because it's not only a government issue but how to get the country upgraded and the people upgraded it's also an issue of how to get the new generation build the self-confidence they need to believe in themselves and to believe that they can do it The first thing for me I think a commitment you need to have a clear commitment because if you don't have a commitment you can have all those beautiful objective vision and so on and so forth but end of the day you can't achieve anything Secondly I think we have discussed a lot about teachers we need to teach teachers learning skills using ICT that is very very important then if we do that we should be okay but most important commitment Thank you Brian and thank you for your sharing I think the message I would give is we all have to be learners and by that I mean there's not enough really good monitoring and evaluation of what we're doing there's an awful lot that we still actually don't know and it's really important that there is good learning amongst everybody involved that's the teachers, the ministers, the education lists in actually using this technology to deliver the effective learning solutions we want and just to give you an example there are programs that have had external reviews done in different ways that show completely different results I'm thinking there's one very well known international program that's often lauded but actually there's research that shows it hasn't delivered on what it claims to have delivered and that just makes me think that we are actually involved in a huge social experiment of which we don't know the outcome and I'm just thinking we are all becoming appendages of the machines most people probably have a mobile phone in their pocket that mobile phone has been very clever it's getting you to take it for a walk every day and that's mobile learning but also just reflect on this one thing there is a lot of good evidence that is now showing that our brains have fundamentally changed and are changing in terms of memory we don't need to remember very much because the device is our memory and how many of you can remember mobile phone numbers when I was a kid I used to know hundreds of mobile phone numbers now I don't because it's on your machine and just take that one example because our young people are growing up without memories and what are we embarking on so I'll just leave that there is a huge amount we still don't know about the experiment that we're embarking on it's important thank you first of all I want to thank my distinguished panel I hope you have enjoyed and learned and most importantly take the opportunity to learn from each other and share if I could summarize one of the things that I get out of this very clear from the success and from the challenges faced by the panel and the discussion is that it's more than just transforming education through technology we really have to look fundamentally at the education system look at it as Tim said as an integrated program and as we have talked earlier it's about committed vision and leadership it's about a partnership and a collaboration with the private sector and the industry bringing together specialized devices that are not just one more tablet but as the case in Lebanon a platform for education that has certain attributes that make it fun to learn but it is about learning and I think as an industry we can help drive that and finally it's about all of us it's about the community of the parents and the cousin and uncles and all of us not just in the hands of the education department or the teachers we all have to engage in this lifelong learning for ourselves and for our kids and in that note and with how many six seconds left I want to thank you for taking the rest of the sessions thank you very much