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Week 1 [2015-05-23]

I’m sitting here in the IT lab at Compostela National High School, preparing for in-service training next week and waiting on a download to finish.  It’s been a good first week for us.  As usual, we expected to have more done at this point than we do… but one step at a time.

This last week was the “Brigada Eskwela”, the annual preparation for the start of the new school year here in the Philippines.  Prior to a student’s enrollment, they and their parents are asked to perform some labor in support of the school.  Thus the whole campus was abuzz with people, building and cleaning materials, and food stalls selling snacks.  The big project this year is deepening and covering the waterway which manages the overflow from sometimes-violent rainstorms.  Watching people build wooden concrete molds, wire and lay rebar, and mix and pour concrete – all by hand – is impressive.  The principal’s office and guidance office are also getting new tile laid, and of course each classroom needs to be cleaned and organized.  Thanks to generous Japanese donors, the school is getting a small stage built as well; the prior stage was demolished to make space for new classrooms. 

We’ve had our own small Brigada Eskwela activity here in the IT lab as well.  The 10th grade Computer Student Specialists (CSSs) were here Thursday and helped replace the old 10/100 Mbps network switches with Gigabit switches.  Our intern Jade also installed some video cards that we brought from America.  Neal fixed a problem with the multiple network interfaces to the server, and he’s made some changes to his systemCheck tool.  I’ve been working with Ma’am Nerry, the IT teacher here, to prepare the FET timetable program for creating the school schedule.  Not surprisingly this first time has been quite a learning experience but I am very excited that we are now ready to do it “for real” after one last meeting with the department heads to confirm the teaching loads.  It is quite a headache to create a school schedule for about 65 teachers and 43 sections of students – and work in numerous additional constraints – but it appears that FET is up to the challenge.  I am so pleased that this should be a big time-saver now and into future years.

Next week is teacher in-service training.  I’ll be giving a presentation Tuesday on the new grading system (and associated new template).  We also have our System Administration training planned for Friday.  Tayud National High School has graciously agreed to host this event.  We are looking forward to being together with IT teachers from all 14 schools served by Reneal IEO!

And Monday we have another exciting event!  Aboitiz Equity Ventures is donating six used monitors to Reneal IEO for use at Kawit National High School.  Jade and I will be traveling to Kawit NHS with Aboitiz Foundation to turn over the monitors to the school.  This will provide an additional six seats in the Kawit NHS lab, thanks to the generosity of Aboitiz!  We are so grateful for their support, and for Reneal IEO Team Philippines member Rogie Abala for facilitating this donation!