Teaching made easy the high-tech way

Teachers need not shed sweat and tears in preparing for the next day’s class. Writer and lecturer Isagani Cruz says modern teachers can take the path of least resistance by simply going to the Internet.

“There is no reason nowadays to try to think up of new ways of teaching” bacause “all the effective ways are now documented in thousands of lesson plans available on the Web,” Cruz says. Cruz is a playwright and levturer at the De La Salle University.

“Digital natives do not ask for Web addresses, they just Google,” Cruz says, adding that there are websites devoted to reprinting lesson plans that have worked.

“Between the Web and the school library, a teacher has a wealth of practical and rested lesson plans to use in the classroom,” Cruz says.

“We cannot equip the youth of the future with the tools of the past,” Cruz quotes the late secretary of education Victor Ordoñez. He sayd he himself only uses PowerPoint slides, but spices up the lecture with selections from YouTube to keep the attention of the audience.

Cruz cites the Foundation for Upgrading the Standard of Education (FUSE), which uses modern technology to improve teachers’ skills. Among the tools FUSE uses, he says, are the Continuing Studies via Television (Constel) videos. These are lessons on video compact discs shown on Knowledge Channel and given free to teachers and students.

FUSE has distributed more than 400,000 Constel video lessons since its establishment on December 1, 1994. Sen. Edgardo H. Angara, Senate education committee chairman at the time, Rep. Salvador H. Escudero III, then House education committee chairman, and businessman Lucio C. Tan established FUSE to raise the standards of education in the Philippines.

Since its founding, FUSE has trained 14,141 teachers, circulated more than 21,000 education journals, and held 159 general assemblies with education experts as resource speakers. FUSE is one of the major beneficiaries of the Tan Yan Kee Foundation.