PUBLIC school partners of Smart Communications Inc. (Smart) can look forward to another exciting round of online sharing about what’s unique in their respective communities with the launch of the 2nd “Doon Po Sa Amin Learning Challenge.”

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Smart is currently accepting entries from student-faculty teams of partner schools under the Smart Schools Program. Registration of school teams and student groups to the competition will be until August 12, 2009. Participants have until end-November 2009 to finish their entries, publish them online and promote their web projects.

The Doon Po Sa Amin Learning Challenge is a search for the richest local content or most unique information uploaded on the worldwide web by student groups and school teams.

Last year’s winner was the Naga City Science High School (NCSHS) for its entry “Si Ina: Sarong Debosyon sa Halawig na Panahon”, a research narrative that presents the Peñafrancia Festival through the years while addressing the social issues revolving around the almost 300-year-old religious tradition.

Besting 34 other entries that made it to the short list, the NCSHS team received the grand prize of P50,000, a trophy, and school equipment. Each member also received a Smart Bro prepaid plug-it kit. Since their entry also won the Best in Social Science topic category award, they got an additional P30,000 in cash and a trophy.

The competition is part of Doon Po Sa Amin, a four-year content generation project which Smart launched last year to encourage teachers and students of Smart Schools Program partner schools to use Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) to generate and share web-based information and educational materials about their respective communities. The official website can be accessed at www.doonposaamin.ph.

Under the Challenge, partner schools form a school team composed of student groups mentored by teachers. School teams are tasked to use desktop and Internet technologies to generate information for their websites, as well as local content using community mapping techniques such as participatory research, interview skills, writing, documentation and resource mobilization.

Guided by their teacher coaches, student groups from the school teams select a particular area of study as their entry, write stories, and publish them online. Each entry must fall under any of seven curriculum-based topic categories, thus allowing participants to analyze and present content using classroom subjects.

The categories include mathematics, science and environment, health and wellness, technology and livelihood, language and literature, arts and culture, and social science.

Student groups will then upload their entries to the mysmartschools website (www.mysmartschools.ph) and link them to their school website. All hosting is provided by Smart for free under the Smart Schools Program.

Entries are evaluated based on the team's collaboration, educational content, ICT integration and community collaboration and impact. Seven winning student groups representing the best for each topic category will win PhP30,000 each plus a computer package. Special awards will also be given to groups with outstanding photos, website design, community impact and student collaboration.

To encourage more entries this year and as part of the continuing initiative to generate online content under its DPSA project, Smart conducted a five-day Content and Web Development training for a total of 154 teachers and students from 40 public high schools nationwide last May.

The training was separated into two tracks: content and web technology to enable participants to concentrate and specialize in just one area—each school has a teacher and a student who learns web content generation, while another teacher-student pair is trained in the technical aspects of web design.

Using this strategy, Smart hopes to help schools create better and richer website content, with students and teachers collaborating to produce relevant and creative online content about their respective schools and communities.

Smart’s initiatives to help promote ICT in education via the Smart Schools Program are part of the company’s “Internet for all” advocacy. To date, there are a total of 180 public high schools and 60 public elementary Smart Schools Program partners nationwide.

The Smart Schools Program is the flagship community service initiative of Smart in education under its corporate social responsibility and community service program "Kabalikat". It is implemented through the Philippine Business for Social Progress, with the support of the Department of Education and Learn.ph Foundation. (Press release)