GES withdraw the SHS ICT textbook

One of the most important things the new educational reform has brought into senior high education is the introduction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as a core and elective subject.

ICT as a subject seeks to give students basic knowledge, understanding and skills. Therefore any textbook written for this very important subject should not lose sight of the above mentioned objective.

It is in this direction that I am calling on the Ghana Education Service (GES) and the Ministry of Education to withdraw the current Government of Ghana approved core ICT textbook for SHS One.

A critical look at the book indicates that it does not meet the requirements of the syllabus stated in the book's own preface. For instance, the book does not mention any vital components in the system unit such as the ports, storage devices, memory, central processing unit (CPU), mother-board etc.

Additionally, the book is full of wrong, incorrect, ambiguous and confusing definitions and explanations of ICT terminology and other issues.

For example, the book states categorically that the system unit is also called the CPU. This is incorrect. A good analogy of this will be to say that the human head is also called the brain.

The system unit is a box/cabinet that houses the motherboard, storage devices, power supply unit etc. and not CPU which is a chip on the motherboard (responsible for executing instructions, data and information.)

Storage devices are the floppy disk drives, hard disk drive, CD/DVD drive, zip disk drives, USB flash memory drives etc. and storage media include CD/DVDs, floppy and zip disks, pen drives etc.

In starting a computer, one only switches it on and the computer boots by itself using the start-up programmes (ROM BIOS) by loading the operating system from the hard disk into memory. This should be the basic explanation for the SHS student, although the process of booting is more detailed than this.

Time and space will not allow me to elaborate on the problems inherent in this textbook.

GES should take a second look at this textbook and withdraw it to save the present and future generation from misinformation.

Written by Emmanuel Dante (ICT tutor) [[email protected]]
Kwahu Ridge Senior High Technical School
Obo-Kwahu, Eastern Region