By ADAM GIFFORD
The Education Ministry is putting $6.5 million a year for three years into its laptops for secondary teachers programme which it expects will fund between 8000 and 14,000 computers.
The new programme is open to all permanent full-time secondary teachers.
The Government will meet two thirds of the total
cost of leasing a laptop for three years, with schools meeting the other third.Schools are also expected to fund related professional development for those teachers from within their existing operating budgets.
The Ministry has selected two Windows laptop suppliers for the scheme, creating an extra element of competition absent from its earlier laptops for principals scheme.
It expects to finalise contract details and announce the successful tenderers next week.
Herald sources say they are Auckland IT procurement and services company Axon supplying Hewlett-Packard/Compaq laptops, Wellington's Laptop Company supplying Toshiba gear, and Renaissance providing Apple iBooks.
At the end of the three year term the laptops will be owned by the leasing company standing behind the scheme.
The principals' scheme, which started earlier this year in conjunction with the launch of an online portal based on Oracle's Think.com service, gave principals the choice of Apple or Toshiba.
The ministry says more than 1500 laptops had been delivered by the end of September and that all principals should have been supplied a laptop by the end of next year.
IDC analyst Darian Bird said Toshiba has dominated sales of laptops into secondary schools.
While Apple is strong in the education sector at primary and tertiary level, its share of the secondary school market is much lower, running at about 10 per cent.
Bird said Compaq put a lot of effort into building up sales of desktop PCs into schools, which the merged Hewlett-Packard/Compaq will try to build on under the new scheme.
Left out in the cold are Dell, which has been marketing aggressively into schools and universities, IBM, Acer, and local PC assemblers such as The PC Company.
A Ministry of Education spokeswoman said no comment will be made before next week's announcement.
