One PC per student will come true.

■One PC per student will come true.

All-party parliamentary group for ICT utilization in education at the Diet Members' Office Building. 

Chairperson Endo, Secretary General Moriyama, Secretary General Ishibashi, former Ministers of MEXT Nakagawa, Kawamura, Hase and Shiotani, former members of MEXT, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) and METI, and others participated.

Following the enactment of last year's "the Act for the Promotion of Information Technology in Education," there was a big step forward in the form of a large supplementary budget, and the group meeting was filled with enthusiasm.

This is one of the achievements of the bipartisan promotion law that was passed.

One PC per person will be implemented at once, and the maintenance of the school LAN will make a great progress.

It took ten years to go from one PC for every seven people to one for every six people. We have made a huge step from there. 

Looking at it from six months ago, it's like a dream.

School informatization, which had been in the period of winter-like hardship for a long time, is now in the light.

The government will promote the project under the name "GIGA School Initiative."

Based on the Promotion Act, the government will formulate a promotion plan, and local governments will also create their plan to promote it. 

I hope that we will keep moving forward without going backward.

MEXT has taken the lead of the project, but METI, together with private companies such as COMPASS, is currently conducting a nationwide "Future Classroom Caravan" to promote the spread of the project. Furthermore, MIC is promoting the installation of optical fiber in schools and the demonstration of 5G usage, emphasizing the collaboration of the three ministries.

PC maintenance provided by the supplementary budget is 45,000 yen per person. Each prefectural government will coordinate the procurement.

MEXT has prepared a basic model for each of the three operating systems to see what can be done with it.

The supplementary budget at the end of the year was for only the grade 5 of elementary schools to the grade 1 of junior high schools as a first step. However, after the first phase, there will be a large increase in the budget, and the providing of PCs to all students will further proceed, as part of the COVID-19 emergency economic stimulus package.

80% of the LAN maintenance will be paid for by the government. That is very high percentage. 

MEX will recommend LTE use as well as Wi-Fi.

There was an explanation provided that LTE is cheaper for small schools. This is groundbreaking.

However, in response to this, a Diet member pointed out that LTE is not subsidized in this package, therefore this was intended to encourage schools to use Wi-Fi, not LTE. 

MEXT responded by explaining the budget constraint situation where Wi-Fi requires a heavy fixed cost and LTE has a running cost, and the Wi-Fi can be subsidized for, but the LTE is difficult to be financed. However, subsidizing for running costs will be an issue in the future.

MEXT’s statement that "BYOD will be introduced in the future" also made me realize that the situation has significantly changed, but whether or not to bring the devices home is "up to the local government.”

Some members of the Diet pointed out that “if that’s the case, it creates an educational gap in communication environment at home.”

That's right. They want to solve IT issues at schools as soon as possible and move quickly on to issues at homes.

Former Minister of MEXT Hiroshi Hase, urged the government to implement 1) the development of a communication environment in all schools, 2) the digitization of all textbooks, and 3) changes in teacher and student evaluation and entrance examinations.

Once again, we think we are at the stage of asking direct and very straight questions for actions to be taken. 

And now that the legislative and executive branches have taken actions, we believe that now it’s the private sector’s turn to take actions.

While school informatization seems to be over the pass, we hear from rural areas about ordinances to regulate children's use of smartphones.

The widespread restriction on the use of cell phones ten years ago is still a hindrance to school informatization.

We need to learn from the history.

The benefits of the new technology should go to children first.