Thursday, November 15, 2007

Moving towards development: The first leap of iSchools BSU




Batangas State University has always regarded human development as a primal source of progress in the country. As the University gears towards a more globalized environment, it keeps abreast with projects which aim to enhance the lives of its constituents and the greater society.


As such, the University is fortunate to make their development visions concrete through Information and Communications Technology (ICT) projects in partnership with the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT). This institution has an active role in streamlining, managing, coordinating, and implementing the various ICT-related plans and policies of the government. It also addresses the urgent need to harmonize and make the country's approach to ICT development more coherent and efficient. CICT is the primary policy planning, coordinating, implementing, and regulating administrative entity of the executive branch of the government that will promote, develop, and regulate integrated and strategic ICT systems to pave the way for reliable and cost-efficient communication facilities and services.


With this in mind, the University is one with CICT in making real useful ICT projects in various places in the country. One of these is the iSchools project which aims to bring to different public high schools the awareness and required knowledge in ICT, this being a part of international and national development missions like the UN Millennium Development Goals, PGMA’s 10-point Agenda: EFA (Education for All), MTPDP 2004-2010, BEC 2002, and the National Framework Plan for ICT in Basic Education.


Initially, CICT ties up with varied State Universities and Colleges (SUCs) in the country. BSU is indeed one in promoting their projects in selected public high schools in some parts of the Region (Region IV) and NCR. The institutions now share the objective of contributing in the integration of ICT in education initiatives of the government to enable graduates to become globally competitive individuals.


This, of course, will be made possible though the following efforts: (1) access to relevant digital content; (2) capability building for teachers and students; and (3) ICT integration in the curriculum.
In addition to this, iSchools Project incorporates ICT in education towards strengthening classroom learning and instruction by expanding access to various sources of information.

Thus, BSU is now on its way to materialize the project and is concentrated in making iSchools a continuous project of the University in realizing its efforts to uplift ICT in the country and make it both palpable and possible a project.