MANILA, Philippines -- The Department of Education (DepEd) and several laptop manufacturers have signed agreements to provide cheap computer notebooks to public school teachers.
The Laptop for Teachers (LT4T) program, which is under the DepEd's Adopt-A-School project, would initially allow public school teachers to purchase notebooks from Neo and Acer at half the price.
Similar deals are being discussed with HP and Lenovo.
DepEd has also signed up with Microsoft Philippines to provide operating system upgrades and donations for the LT4T program.
Microsoft will donate $7 per unit to the Adopt-A-School Program for each teacher that avails of the laptop under the program.
Adopt-A-School Executive Director Paul Soriano said the project has set a P30,000 maximum price cap for laptops, while the manufacturers agreed to reduce the price of the notebooks by half.
DepEd would also come up with a loan program for teachers who would shoulder the remaining P15,000, he said.
"We're working out a scheme with Landbank to provide easy loans to teachers," Soriano said an interview with INQUIRER.NET.
Soriano said the laptops would be installed with several learning management tools, such as record books for students and teaching aids for fundamental subjects like mathematics, science and English.
Teachers wanting to acquire a new laptop under the program must have a minimum monthly take home salary of P4,000.
Interested teachers also need to pass an Internet and Computing Core Certification (IC3) examination offered by an online certification company called Certiport (www.certiport.com).
Soriano said the examination ensures that teachers buying the laptop are competent to use the technology they purchase.
"The idea here is to provide a tool for teachers to use in their classrooms. They have to fully maximize their laptops in teaching students," Soriano said.
The minimum specifications for the notebook are Core 2 processor with 2 gigabytes of memory and 160 gigabytes of hard disk. There is no maximum or minimum limit for the screen size of the notebooks.