Biñan City launches free online tutorials for youth during quarantine

Biñan Online Tutorials for Kids and Youth was launched by the Biñan City Youth and Sports Development Office to provide online learning services during the quarantine period. Image: Biñan City Youth and Sports Development Office Facebook page

The Youth and Sports Development Office (YASDO) of Biñan, City in Laguna has launched free online tutorials for kids and teens on Wednesday, April 1, to ensure families that their children will continue to learn while the community faces the COVID-19 pandemic.

Biñan Online Tutorials for Kids and Youth primarily aims to provide an avenue for students to continue learning while staying at home, and to encourage a culture of learning among the youth while they are having fun.

“Since pupils and students spend the rest of their day inside their houses, the city has decided to come up with this supplementary program to reinforce and/or remediate learners of the topics they may have missed in school,” Alfred Benedict Suarez, head of Biñan City YASDO, told INQUIRER.net.

At the moment, the online program already has 50 elementary students who are in grades 4 to 6, and 50 secondary students who are in grades 7 to 9. These students were selected through an online application form filled up by their parents, on a first-come, first-served basis. Then, the final list of online learners was given to the online teachers for consolidation and formation of group chats, to be used for information dissemination.

Classes are conducted twice a week and run for an hour and a half. The schedule depends on the availability of the majority in the group, and they will then decide on the time and day of when classes will be conducted.

A total of eight classes will be done for the two levels, covering English, Math and Science, under a one-child, one-subject policy. These eight groups will be the first batch, composed only of Biñanense youth, who will be attending classes for a month.

Supervising them are eight Biñanense volunteer online teachers wherein the majority are public school teachers from the division of Biñan City. They were given various modes of teaching. Some use video chat on Facebook Messenger, video conference on Zoom, Google Classroom, or DepEd Commons; the students also use the same applications.

The submission of worksheets and quizzes will also be done along with pre-assessment and post-assessment exams, very much like a classroom set up, only using a variety of online platforms this time. Online teachers will send supplementary tasks to their respective group chats, for the students to accomplish on their free days. Parents and guardians of these online learners also supervise their children while taking the online tutorial.

Interested parents sent private messages to the official Facebook page of YASDO. Next, they were given a link to where they can sign up for their children. Registration ended on March 30 for the first batch of students, while the online tutorial already started, but another batch is forthcoming.

https://www.facebook.com/bcysdo/posts/897290284025270

Mc Larnel Aliluran, a youth volunteer in Biñan assigned to manage the program, together with the Biñan City YASDO team, will be posting updates for the next batch of online tutorials via the program’s Facebook page. At present, the organizers are still gathering additional volunteer teachers to accommodate new enrollees. JB

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