+ BACKGROUND, CHALLENGES AND OBJECTIVES
City of Balanga is the capital of the Province of Bataan. It has a population of roughly 100,000 people. Manila is just 2 to 3 hours by car and less than an hour by ferry boat. It is primarily a residential-agricultural city, with a rapidly growing commercial sector possessing a land area of 11,163 hectares.
The city is not just the center of commerce in the province; it is also the province's education hub catering to eight colleges and one university. It is home also to eighteen public primary and two secondary schools.
To complement the usual classroom instruction in these schools, the city government has constructed three School Learning Hubs (SLH) --- classrooms that are provided with fast internet and computers through which Khan Academy may be accessed. All in all, there are now some six hundred computers in these hubs. SLH can also act as review center to provide students remedial lessons to better their understanding on subjects where they do not perform well.
▲ Barangay Learning hub
With the vision of becoming a “SMART University Town 2030: An Established Center for Global Technology Businesses,” the city puts a premium on school facilities, teacher education and scholarship programs with emphasis on strengthening IT capability.
The objectives of the initiative are as below:
1) to strengthen collaboration between parents and teachers
2) to enable parents to view their child’s school performance any time of day.
+ ACTIONS AND IMPLEMENTATION
1. Identify factors to complete the monitoring network
2. Acquisition of both hardware and software requirements
3. Develop software and set up hardware
4. Training of end-users (parents, teachers)
5. Gathering feedback from end-users for further improvement of the project
+ OUTCOMES AND IMPACTS
Thus far, there are no outcomes or impacts of the initiative. However, once developed and implemented, it is expected that students’ grades will improve due to closer collaboration between parents and teachers and faster acquisition of information about student performance.
+ REPLICABILITY AND SCALABILITY
The initiative is replicable. But for it to work in a particular area, there should be internet access. Telecommunication facilities should also be present. Teachers and parents should also acquire a fair degree of IT literacy to able to use it.
Due care, however, should be taken in determining which pieces of information about a student will be included lest his/her data privacy be violated.
+ BUDGET AMOUNT
This initiative has not yet been budgeted. But that does not mean that it has not been acted upon. Some of its requirements have already been met such as the hiring of computer programmers and network administrators and purchase of IT-related equipment.
To their credit, our programmers have already developed some twenty softwares which are already being used internally by the city government to facilitate the operation of various departments.