Councilor calls for digital literacy training for teachers

CEBU, Philippines - Cebu City Councilor Nendell Hanz Abella, the city’s Deputy Mayor for Education, lobbies before private firm Globe Telecom, Inc. to expand its digital literacy training program to public school teachers in the city aside from catering to private-employed educators.

The company’s country-wide training program, on its third leg this year, was held in Cebu City hosted by the University of Cebu, to which Abella serves as the Vice Chancellor for Administration.

In his opening message yesterday during the culmination activity held in UC Lapu-Lapu and Mandaue campus, Abella remarked that he also intends to link with Globe Telecom Inc. for the company to bring its program to Cebu City public school teachers.

Michelle Tapia, Globe advisor and head of Education Strategy and Innovation, said she was open to the idea.

“Earlier, when I was with Michelle Tapia, I told her if you can also extend this to local government units since this can help a lot to our public school teachers and then she promised to visit my office one of these days. This is a welcome development,” Abella said at the sidelines while the culminating activity was going on.

For now, he said, he is considering to integrate this digital literacy program to the city government’s “upgrading” project which offers a 24-unit certificate program for public school teachers.

“With this Globe training, this can help our teachers especially in this present time wherein various jobs commonly entail the use of technology. So this is important that their learning can also be imparted to the students,” he said.

This upgrading project, he said, was a brainchild of Councilor Joy Augustus Young and Abella himself initiated to revive it under the present administration after it had been stopped for several years.

Luckily, the project that started last October 2016 was allocated with P30 million under the city’s general budget to fully sustain it, he said.

Abella found the significance of boosting this project after results of some studies showed that students handled by teachers that enrolled in the certificate program were performing better on their academics.

For the digital literacy training program, teachers undergo a three-week professional development program, including a two-day immersive boot camp, distance project-based learning, and personalized coaching.

Globe’s training program dubbed as “PRISM” was earlier facilitated in Metro Manila and Naga City. After Cebu, the training will be held in Pampanga and Cagayan de Oro within the first half of the year.

In Cebu City, around 140 teachers, mostly from private institutions, across the Visayas region completed yesterday’s training program that is supported by Globe myBusiness.

During the closing activity yesterday, the teachers showcased their various projects on technology-enabled instruction and content development.

Tapia shared to reporters and bloggers that the program is supposedly designed to equip private school teachers with technological skills or digital learning skills for effective classroom teaching.

She said that as Globe aims to assist to the transition stage of the K-to-12 implementation, they prioritized senior high school teachers from private schools but they also opened the training program for college professors and a few public school teachers.

She explained that there is a different program for public schools named “Global Filipino Schools,” which is another corporate social responsibility initiative  of Globe. The program aims to provide sets of devices for the beneficiary schools. (FREEMAN)