Untrained Teachers

In 2009, the Calderón administration launched a program to outfit 75 percent of the nation's elementary and middle school classrooms with internet-connected laptops for every student and projector screens. This was a not insufficient program, which implied going from essentially zero to 26 million students and teachers in three years. Finding competent teachers has proven a significant barrier to the program's success, with only 1.5 percent of them trained to work in the digital classrooms. One teacher offers his thoughts as to why:

[The training] isn't enough and it's never going to be enough because technology is advancing. We were students of chalk and poster-board. Of giving the class with a drawing, if you knew how to draw. We weren't born with computers. The first project was the classroom with media, and we didn't know how, we didn't want to touch them because we thought we would break them.

The teacher in question says he eventually learned how to use the equipment, motivated primarily by the desire to not be seen as a "caveman" by the students.