Smart Communications Inc. public school partners can look upto to another round of online sharing about what's unique in their respective communities with the launch of the 2nd Doon Po Sa Amin Learning Challenge. Currently, Smart is accepting entries from student-faculty teams of partner schools under the Smart Schools Program. Registration of school teams and student groups to the competition will be until Aug. 12. Participants have until the end of November 2009 to finish their entries, publish them online and promote their web projects. The Doon Po Sa Amin Learning Challenge is a search for the richest local content or most unique information uploaded on the worldwide web by student groups and school teams. Besting 34 other entries that made it to the short list, the NCSHS team received the grand prize of P50,000, a trophy and school equipment. Each member also received a Smart Bro prepaid plug-it kit. Their entry also won the Best in Social Science topic category award and got an additional P30,000 in cash and trophy.
The competition is part of Doon Po Sa Amin, a four-year content generation project which Smart launched last year to encourage teachers and students of partner schools to use Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to generate and share web-based information and educational materials about their respective communities. The official website can be accessed at www.doonposaamin.ph. Under the Challenge, partner schools form a school team composed of student groups mentored by teachers. School teams are tasked to use desktop and Internet technologies to generate information for their websites, as well as local content using community mapping techniques such as participatory research, interview skills, writing, documentation and resource mobilization. Guided by their teacher coaches, student groups from the school teams select a particular area of study as their entry, write stories and publish them online. Each entry must fall under any of seven curriculum-based topic categories, thus allowing participants to analyze and present content using classroom subjects. The categories include mathematics, science and environment, health and wellness, technology and livelihood, language and literature, arts and culture, and social science.
