2023-08-28 04:00:00
Digital teaching at school
By no means all schools already have the equipment for teaching digital content.
(Foto: DigitalVision/Getty Images)
Berlin In Baden-Württemberg, lessons with digital content should be the norm in the future. At least that’s what it says in the draft for a new school law by Minister of Education Theresa Schopper (Greens). Other federal states also want to make their teaching more digital and thus adapt it to the realities of life for children and young people.
But that would not be possible at the moment because not all schools have a broadband connection, which would be a prerequisite for a high-performance school WLAN. According to the Stuttgart Ministry of Education, this should be done by the end of 2024, i.e. in a year and a half.
In a recent survey by the digital association Bitkom, almost nine out of ten schoolchildren in Germany named poor or no WiFi as the biggest problem in their school – far ahead of the teacher shortage.
But the differences are enormous. According to a Handelsblatt survey, only five federal states have come close to full coverage with broadband connections. In the others, the situation is moderate to bad, sometimes not even every third school has a broadband or fiber optic connection. The others usually make do with a slower connection, which at least allows the rectorate to send e-mails. Some ministers of education simply don’t know what the current situation is – or don’t want to say it publicly.
Hamburg, Bavaria, Hesse, Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt report peak values for fast internet connections. 95 to 100 percent of the schools there are now connected – with at least 50 Mbit/s. In Rhineland-Palatinate it is also 95 percent, but only with a minimum performance of 16 Mbit/s.
In Berlin the situation is particularly bad
The Ministry of Education in North Rhine-Westphalia, where around a quarter of all schoolchildren in Germany learn, does not know exactly. According to surveys by the State Ministry of Economics, two-thirds of the “main locations” of the schools are connected to fiber optics. In Saxony, 80 percent of schools have broadband connections, in Brandenburg it was only 63 percent at the end of 2022.
The situation in the capital is very bad: out of a total of 600 schools, only 100 currently have a “high-performance Internet connection”, and there are 62 with fiber optics. Altogether, only a good quarter of the schools are able to design the lessons digitally. The spokesman for Education Senator Katharina Günther-Wünsch (CDU) announced that the full supply should be achieved “by the end of the legislative period” – i.e. 2028.
Lower Saxony has only vague knowledge of the digital connection of its schools: A survey of the headteachers revealed that 93 percent hope that they will have a WiFi connection by the end of 2024 at the latest. However, only four out of five of the rectors surveyed took part in the survey. The Mecklenburg-West Pomeranian Ministry of Education is also clueless: Only four out of ten of the school administrations surveyed answered a survey, and the second attempt is currently underway.
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