MINDA Soldevilla, a Physics teacher at Buenavista High School in the island-province of Guimaras, brought her student to the Internet café in preparation for the quiz bee last year.

Amazed over the wealth of information she had at her fingertips, the student told her teacher: “Ma’am, it appears that nothing is impossible to know if I know how to use the Internet.”

"The Manny Pacquiao Blog". Click here for stories and updates on the Filipino boxing champ.

Soldevilla’s student is one of the luckier ones since the teacher is a believer in Internet-aided learning, even buying her own laptop which she uses for classroom instruction.

“I have to be innovative to make my students see a bigger world outside of our small island,” she said.

Soldevilla was one of 42 high school and elementary teachers from the education division of Guimaras who attended “Building Classrooms without Walls: Maximizing the Internet and Creating online Resources”, a training conducted by Smart Communications Inc. (Smart) as part of a collaboration with Petron to help rehabilitate the socio-economic conditions of the island following the oil spill in August 2006.

Under its Smart Schools Program, Smart provides Internet access, content and training to over 240 public schools nationwide, including Nueva Valencia National High School and San Miguel Elementary School in Guimaras Island.

The leading wireless services provider expanded its training to include all public elementary and high schools in Guimaras as part of an agreement with Petron to integrate ICT in public school education in the island.
Darwin Flores, Smart Public Affairs Community Partnerships senior manager, said that the training aims to help public school teachers gain access to the Internet via the PLDT group’s wide range of communications solutions and train them on how to maximize the resources and tools available on the information superhighway for the benefit of their students.

Lloyd Anthony Layug, training director of NetLearn Ventures which was tapped to conduct the training, said the module provided the participants with skills for Internet integration toward effective research projects, introducing new concepts through visual aids, supplemental learning, more effective collaborative learning and communicating with others through blogs, websites and emails.

“With the strategies that they’ve learned, our teachers can present their lessons in a more creative way to arouse the interest of students and, likewise, develop higher order thinking skills,” said Science Education supervisor Edlyn Legita.

And present they did, simulating a classroom discussion based on a lesson plan that adopted online-related strategies in various subjects – from biology, physics, math and geometry to social studies, literature and language as well as folk dancing.

“Through the training, I upgraded my teaching efficiency by becoming more familiar on the use of technology to enhance classroom discussion,” said high school social studies teacher Ronie Alegria.

First grade teacher Alma Cabangal said she will share insights gained from the training with fellow teachers and encourage them to make use of the Internet in presenting their lessons. Another elementary school teacher, Arlan Maro, added that he now knows how to make visual materials more appealing to students, thus helping him motivate them better.

Petron director Carmen Pedrosa, who is also a columnist of the Philippine Star, shared with the participants how she has benefited from online connectivity.

“I am an opinion writer and for me to write well, I need all the facts, which I get from among others, the Internet,” she said.

Pedrosa reminded the teachers that by helping their students to make use of the Internet, they can now open doors for their students and enable them “to try anything now that the world has been laid open before them.”

As for Soldevilla, she believes that Internet access has made the world smaller yet also “wider and limitless”.

“This limitless source of information and learning is a journey in knowledge power that begins with a mouse click,” she added.

Meanwhile, trainings on ICT integration were simultaneously conducted for teachers of public elementary and high schools adopted under SSP in 2008. These were held in clusters – the NCR cluster at the University of Makati (UMAK), North Luzon cluster at the Systems Plus College Foundation in Angeles City, Cebu cluster at the University of San Jose-Recoletos in Cebu City, Iloilo cluster at the University of San Agustin in Iloilo City and the Mindanao cluster at the Xavier University-Ateneo de Cagayan in Cagayan de Oro City. (PR)