The «Smart School» program was developed by a working group under the Ministry of Education of the Kyrgyz Republic with the support of «Freedom of Information» program of Soros Foundation- Kyrgyzstan in cooperation with the Polish colleagues who have already been implementing Digital school project for about 4 years.
This program is aimed at creating an environment to support the quality of pedagogy and knowledge of the children that will help them become successful in the future.
The program is based on four main priorities:
1. e-Pupil — is aimed at increasing the capacity of students and increasing their knowledge and use of i digital information technologies.
2. e-Textbook — emphasizes the substantive issues and capacity of modern digital teaching tools for learning, with an essential condition that all the educational materials will be open licensed – the so-called Open education resources (OER).
3. e-Teacher — is aimed at training teachers, regardless of subject fields to apply digital information technologies in the educational process.
4. e-School (infrastructural) — involves providing schools with access to the Internet and computer classes, as well as the automation of internal processes in schools and interaction with the Ministry and its structures.
As Minister of Education, Elvira Sarieva, noted this year at least 1 000 schools are supposed to be connected to the Internet and the success of this index depends on the Internet service providers, most of which responded to the call of the Ministry.
State Communications Agency worked out a separate concept of introduction of information technologies in education and other social institutions.
In the near future the Ministry will select a group of content developers of the unified educational repository with quality educational materials in digital formats in Kyrgyz and other languages.
Computer science will be a cross-cutting subject for pupils, and a new subjective standard has been developed and is under approbation at the pilot schools of the KR.
A new teacher training institute is going to be established, and will have a program which includes on a mandatory basis the elements e-education for all teachers regardless of their subject orientation. The minister also announced that later on this year there is a plan in conjunction with the State Registration Service to create a unified system of students accounting, which will be the basis for monitoring and evaluation of schools performances.
