The Ministry of Education and Sports has asked schools to halt the use of smartphones as teaching aids. The State Minister for Higher Education, Dr Chrysostom Muyingo issued the orders at a press briefing at the Ministry of Education offices in Kampala.

The minister noted that while smartphones can bridge the ICT gap in schools and aid learning, there is no policy to regulate their use. He therefore asked schools to stop using smartphones until the government can come up with a holistic policy regulating their usage in learning.

According to Muyingo, using smartphones without a policy could expose learners to content that might not be age-appropriate. He also says that if allowed, smartphones would be a source of destruction for the learners who could easily be tempted to check their phones during lessons.

The ministry’s stand comes a few days after some schools decided to resort to smartphones and other electronic gadgets to facilitate the implementation of the learner-centred lower secondary school curriculum.

Nakaseero Secondary School and Kololo Secondary School are some of the schools that had resorted to smartphone usage to aid learning. The phones are only used during group discussions for research on classwork. At Nakasero secondary school, the phones are labelled and kept in the office of the Director of Studies and are only used in class under the supervision of the subject teacher.

Officials at the National Curriculum Development Center are however of the view that smartphones could be used to help schools implement the lower secondary curriculum. John Okumu, the manager of the secondary department at NCDC, says that smartphones would help solve challenges that the institution has had in distributing textbooks.

Okumu says instead of printing textbooks, soft copies can easily be accessed by both learners and teachers, which will help with the implementation of the new curriculum. In addition to halting the use of smartphones as teaching aids, Minister Muyingo asked all schools to stop setting visitations on Sundays.

According to Muyingo, visitations were halted as a means to stop the transmission of COVID-19 from homes to schools and vice-versa.

Muyingo says while they understand the plight of parents who last saw their children in January when schools re-opened after almost two years of closure, he asked them to be patient and wait for the term to end.

Schools are expected to close for the first term holidays in April.