New laptops for P.E.I. teachers causing headaches, says group
The P.E.I. Teachers' Federation says new laptop computers recently assigned to some teachers are causing a few problems.
This year, the Department of Education purchased 600 laptops for all high school teachers to use in the classroom, as well as for marking and planning at home.
Federation president Gilles Arsenault says many older desktop computers have been removed from classrooms.
Since then, Arsenault says the federation has received more than a dozen calls from teachers and principals running into technical glitches with the laptops.
"If they're out one day, a substitute teacher can come in the classroom and there'd be no laptops," he said.
"There's also a question of liability and who is responsible for the laptops. And some of them aren't compatible or weren't ready to be going on the system. And there's different issues we've heard of. So the problem, I guess, seems to be a lack of planning."
A spokesperson for the P.E.I. Department of Education says schools now have additional laptops for substitute teachers, and problems connecting laptops to school networks have been fixed.
