REGINA – The Saskatchewan government wants its students to be wired when they are at school.
The government, the province’s two universities and its regional colleges are covering the costs of wiring 100 more Saskatchewan schools into the provincial educational communications network.
The recent provincial budget includes $1.6 million of government money for the improvements. By giving the schools fiber optics and other high-tech equipment, students in small rural Saskatchewan schools will be able to tap into libraries that contain more material than their own schools, education minister Pat Atkinson said.
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More courses will also be offered to rural students, she said, because schools can share the expertise of teachers. She said it is becoming difficult to ensure students are taught subjects such as chemistry, physics, calculus and computer science in some schools because they have so few teachers.
But now the wired schools will be able to share classes and teachers by remote links.
“This is not about making education cheaper, but about extending education,” Atkinson said. “Students in rural Saskatchewan have to have the same access to the same knowledge base as students living in urban Saskatchewan in order to get into our post-secondary institutions.
“We don’t want students in rural Saskatchewan to get left behind.”
