Digitization of schools: Tonne wants to accelerate in 2021

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Hanover (dpa / lni) - Minister of Culture Grant Hendrik Tonne (SPD) insisted on the benefits for the students after his appeal to the municipalities to speed up the digitization of schools.

"My appeal to everyone involved is that we want to and must use 2021 in order to become faster," said Tonne in Hanover.

It must be made possible that the children benefit from better equipment.

The schools are called upon to use the possibilities of digital learning platforms, the teachers should seize further training opportunities and the school authorities use the funds of the digital pact to improve the equipment of the schools, said Tonne.

"We should look ahead and see how we can do this in 2021."

This was preceded by criticism of the Lower Saxony City Council of Tonne's plan to show the progress of the municipalities in the hitherto slow retrieval of funds from the digital pact on an interactive map.

This was a “slap in the face of the school authorities”, the city council had responded, and they would not be publicly pilloried.

The school authorities would be left alone with the permanent financing of digitization by the state, not all expenses would be financed permanently through the digital pact.

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Against this background, Tonne stated that it must be possible to address critical developments such as the use of the digital pact funds.

For him, it's not about assigning blame, but about improving learning with digital media and looking ahead.

So far, around 13 percent and thus slightly more than 61 million euros from the digital pact for Lower Saxony have been approved, by the end of the year this should be 50 percent or around 260 million euros, Tonne demands.

The digital pact was launched in 2019 with originally five billion euros from the federal government and 500 million euros from the federal states for the construction of the digital infrastructure in schools, for example for the installation of the school's own WLAN or for the purchase of digital boards, so-called smartboards.

Most recently, the program was topped up three times by 500 million euros each: to finance IT administrators for the schools, to purchase work laptops for teachers and to purchase equipment for students in need so that they can take part in distance learning during the Corona crisis enable.

© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210222-99-537929 / 2