In almost every village in every town, there are legends and myths, traditions and folklore. There are stories about how places got their names, how popular practices got started or how rivers, lakes, mountains or some other important landmarks originated.

Now Smart Communications Inc. wants schools to mine this mother lode of educational resource for gems that will advance the students’ learning of the major components of the curriculum—mathematics, science and environment, health and wellness, technology and livelihood, language and literature, arts and culture, and social science.

The four-year Doon po Sa Amin project’s goal is to generate online content for school websites. It encourages teachers and students to use computer and Internet technologies in producing and sharing web-based information and educational materials about their communities.

Stories of home

The project is particularly designed to put additional and more substantive content to the websites that partners in the Smart Schools Program have already put up. It aims to make the sites more informative and interesting to browsers, usually native sons who have strayed farther from home and are eager for news.

The Smart Schools Program is the telecommunication company’s flagship community service in education. Through the program, Smart provides Internet access, online content and teacher training.

The Doon po sa Amin project aims “to build an online network of educators and learners who are highly capable of generating rich local content for the promotion and development of (the culture, ways and traditions of local) communities.”

That it will also help preserve stories that give places their distinctive color and personality is a most welcome and quite significant consequence of the initiative.

The main participants in the Doon po sa Amin project are the over 180 schools that have partnered with Smart, as host, in putting up their websites. In the few years that the sites have been operational, the schools’ alumni and residents of the places where the institutions are located and who have since moved, have found the Internet addresses their main sources of news about the alma mater and the old neighborhood and friends they left behind.

Smart sweetens the story search by including as one of the project’s components the Doon po sa Amin Challenge (www.doonposaamin.ph) that ends in December.

School partners not only generate stories from their communities to upload into their web sites but, if they submit the best entry, they can also win P30,000 cash and one year free Internet connection as grand prize. Other attractive prizes are at stake.
More than 350 student groups from 83 Smart school partners are now busy researching their Doon po sa Amin stories. Winners will be announced in early 2009.

Centerpiece

The Doon po sa Amin project, the centerpiece of Smart’s participation in the recent 3rd National ICTs (information communication technologies) in Basic Education in Bacolod City, will hopefully inspire website operators/managers in developing materials that go beyond the usual “What’s new in the barrio?” to make them interesting even to other schools, non-alumni and non-residents as well.

As to be expected, the main focus of Smart’s education project, aside from advancing learning in the different curriculum areas, is to hone the skills of both teachers and students in the use of computers and Internet technologies in generating web-based information and educational materials about their communities.

Recognizing that in this technology-driven age young people may turn out to be more computer savvy than their mentors, Smart made sure that the teachers do not relinquish their roles by having them trained by experts before they tackled the task of putting up and managing their websites.

Two of the trainors whom Smart enlisted for the Visayas, Teresita Celestial of the Don Bosco Technical College and Julien Semblante of the University of Cebu main campus, were in Bacolod to help Smart showcase its project. Their “students”—Arnold G. Zamora of Moalboal National High School, Edlyn E. Bueno of Medellin National Science and Technology School and Angelina M. Matbagon of Mandaue City Comprehensive National High School, all of the province of Cebu; and Jenelou John F. Israel of the Tagbilaran City Science High School in Bohol—explained how they were drilled in basic computer literacy to be effective managers of their websites. Visit www.smartschool.ph.