Computer giant IBM is to invest $1 million (£714,000) in online networks in three schools in a disadvantaged area of west Dublin near its Irish plant. This will be matched by the Department of Education and Science to bring the project's total cost over three years to £1.5 million.
The scheme was announced yesterday by the Minister for Education and Science, Mr Martin, and the chairman of IBM, Mr Louis Gerstner Jnr. It is the first such investment in a European country as part of IBM's Reinventing Education programme to increase educational standards using information and communications technology (ICT).
The three schools in Blakestown - two primary schools and a community school - will be the first of three clusters of Irish schools to benefit from the new initiative, said Mr Martin. He added that it represented "a simple, but in many ways revolutionary idea of finding ways of systematically sharing information and learning between pupils, teachers, parents and the wider community".
Among the facilities it will offer are: ICT links to enable teachers in different schools to compare information and lesson plans, and to do distance-training courses; links with parents so they can see how their children are performing and discuss their work online with teachers; and links to help university, community and business leaders act as online tutors for students and teachers.
Mr Martin said that since June, 8,000 teachers, or around 20 percent of the entire teaching profession, had attended basic ICT courses. Mr Gerstner, noting that education reform was his "personal passion", said the Reinventing Education programme now existed in a third of the US's states, and had also started in Brazil and Vietnam. "Simply stated, a business can only succeed inside vibrant viable communities, and the health of every community depends on the quality of its schools."
The IBM programme had not come to Ireland "simply to drop computers into some classrooms and hope for the best". He warned against expectations of "quick fixes" in education.
"However, in the hands of great teachers, committed administrators and politicians and motivated parents, this technology can be and is an exceptionally potent tool.
"Technology can and does dissolve barriers like time, the length of the school day, week and year that have changed so little over the years . . . It allows us to fight the educational status quo with modern tools and assign antiquated practices and methodologies to their rightful place in history."
Mr Gerstner said he had seen the Reinventing Education programme work, and "teachers and parents love it". Parents who did not have a computer at home could use workstations in local community centres.
