Smart introduces mEducation to school children in remote island barangays

MANILA, Philippines - Wireless leader Smart Communications, Inc. (Smart) is combining a pioneering teaching framework with mobile technologies to bring quality education to students, even those in isolated islets like Botigues.

The geographical remoteness of the school in Botigues poses a lot of problems to the residents, including lack of electricity and issues related to education.

Smart hopes to address the island’s problems related to education by fusing the Dynamic Learning Program (DLP), the innovative teaching framework developed by renowned physicists, with mobile technologies as part of its initiatives in mEducation.

With the program, Grade 7 students of Botigues High School in Botigues, an islet that is an hour by outrigger boat from the main island of Bantayan in Cebu, will now be able to listen to the lectures of an expert teacher in Mathematics from Doong National High School, which is on another islet.

School head Roger Alingasa, who oversees the secondary level in the Bantayan mainland as well as the three other islets of Doong, Botigues and Lipayran, said the only school in Botigues opened just this school year a seventh grade with only one teacher handling all subjects including extra-curricular activities for each of the two sections.

“We want to thank Smart for this opportunity of using our school as pilot site for its newest mEducation initiative. This is seen to significantly boost the performance of our students particularly in the areas of Mathematics and Science,” said Alingasa.

Based on the results of the school’s National Career Assessment Exams last year, the average percentage scores of the students was 50 percent for both Math and Science, well below the national standards of 70 percent.

Initially, Math will be covered by the initiative but will eventually expand to other subjects once the school has fully adopted the program.

“We are harnessing the power of mobile technology to extend the reach or make more pervasive a non-technology solution in education,” said Ramon Isberto, head of Smart Public Affairs Group.

“Over ten years of implementing education, one important thing we learned is we’re not educators. We work with innovators who know more. Our formula is to get technology, combine this with innovative learning programs, and partner with educators and interactive learners. It’s when we get these four elements together that we get the best benefits,” Isberto explained.

The program launch held in Cebu City last September 26 was attended by representatives of the GSM Association (GSMA), representatives of the Doong and Botigues high schools, and Ramon Magsaysay Awardees and renowned physicists, Dr. Christoper Bernido and Dr. Ma. Victoria Carpio-Bernido, who developed the DLP initially for their school in Jagna, Bohol but is now being implemented in other schools across the country.

Based on a simulation at the Cordova National High School held on the same day, the seventh grade Math class of Doong in Bantayan – an island on the northern tip of Cebu that is 136 kilometers by road and sea from Cebu City – will be beamed through video to an extension classroom in the islet of Botigues that is farther still by over an hour.

Smart has developed DLP-provided content into text and video for the mEducation initiative that will be piloted in the two schools.

Students at the extension school in Botigues will get the activities through Smart-provided tablets and copy these on paper.  Once done, the facilitator at Botigues will scan the students’ outputs and send these to the expert teacher in Doong, who will go over them before sending the same back to Botigues.

To make this exchange easier, Smart, through Voyager Innovations, has developed a mobile application specifically for the mEducation initiative.

Doong and Botigues will start using the program for seventh grade Math by the last quarter of 2013.

“Smart’s mEducation program shows that the DLP can be made to work with the most disadvantaged with the help of technology,” said Dr. Christopher Bernido.

DLP’s innovative, scientific, and non-traditional framework of teaching that entails no homework, has very little lectures, and involves lots of student activities, was precisely designed to address issues that the Philippine educational system has had to grapple with such as lack of teachers, textbooks, and classrooms.

The DLP makes this possible through a progression from familiar and doable activities to complicated tasks.

“Using the DLP activity sheets, students write clear learning targets. Any complex task leading to a required competency is divided into ten steps, with each step getting broken down into still smaller ones,” Bernido pointed out.

By the end of the school year, each student will have accomplished 150-200 pages of concept notes, drills, exercises, and illustrations in each major subject and answered a total of 4,890 questions, said Bernido.

Since it does not rely so much on teacher intervention, the program is disaster-resistant because students can resume doing the DLP-provided activities even if the teacher has not gone back to school.

Ronda Zelezny-Green, of the GSMA mEducation team, said the Smart program shows the use of mobile technology in an intelligent way. She said she also learned from the presentations that it effectively addresses challenges specific to the Philippines.

“What’s good about the DLP is it improves the performance not just of the bright students but the whole class, as shown in the performance of students in standardized assessment tests,” said Isberto.

“The challenge for us is to make sure that this initiative works so that it can be replicated to other schools in other parts of the country,” said Alingasa.

For more details on the groundbreaking teaching framework, visit www.dlp.ph or like us on www.facebook/DynamicLearningProgram.