Yesterday I attended an educational workshop entitled “Trends and Developments in Math and Science Subjects” which was organized by the Computers Professional Union. In attendance were around 50 high school math and science teachers who eagerly participated in the various activities. Most of the participants came from Metro Manila but there were some who came from as far away as Bicol.

It has been a while since I attended a workshop that involves the teachers. Most of the workshops that I have attended these last few months had students as participants. It is quite distressing to know that there has not been much improvement with regards to the use of computer technology in education. As the facilitators presented the latest innovations in teaching using the advances in computer technology in their field, the common response coming from the participants was the need to have a repository of such activities. It is as if they were still considering the use of computers in their school as stand alone units much like a glamorized encyclopedia. This affirms the fact that in spite the rapid developments on computing that took place these last couple of years, our educators still uses the 1990's model in which concentrates more on computer hardware rather than its effective utilization.

Sustainability is still the primary issue. While the teachers most especially coming from the public schools acknowledge that their schools have the necessary computer hardware available mostly coming form donations of private and foreign entities. Their main problem is still how to come up with a program that would ensure its sustainability. Most of the time school administrators were very reluctant to allow access to students and teachers to computer resources out of fear of it breaking down. This situation could easily be remedied if the Department of Education would just allow the operation of a technology based cooperative mainly composed of teachers and parents using the Internet café model. I remember during my elementary days that we were required to buy our school supplies from the cooperative store so that the profits derived would be used to support the operations of the school. If the DepEd allows the parent-teachers cooperative to handle the operation of the school canteen, I really don’t see any reason why it could not come up with a cooperative Internet café inside their public school campus.

Another major issue is one of access. It seems that school administrators are still using computer technology as a marketing tool to increase their enrollment and not really as a tool to support learning. One proof of this is that students still have primary access to computer labs while teachers are not allowed to use the schools computers. This is a situation that creates an imbalance to education. We have teachers who are not allowed to have access to an educational tool that would help them improve their teaching and we have students who are very tech savvy since he is able to use the computer in his favorite Internet cafe. Teachers access is vital so that they could have access to additional materials and techniques that they are going to use in the classrooms. Teachers must be also have the same level of computing skills as their students.

The absence of a standard in computer education is also bringing some confusion on how technology could be used in the school setting. Schools are more software centered that they based learning on their student's mastery of the given software. So it is not so difficult to understand the low quality of school work like researches and term papers since students tend to merely cut and paste items they find in the Internet and pass it as their own work. 21st century skills requires the students to be able to process information from various sources and to be able to use them towards the achievement of a common goal.