Empowering communities and helping underserved people to become more productive, creative and self-reliant: these key pillars have guided the Ayala Foundation's vision to help improve the lives of Filipinos for more than five decades. Founded in 1961, the foundation has spearheaded a wide range of programmes to promote education and sustainable livelihoods in the Philippines.
Around 4,000 teachers in the Philippines are using Microsoft Data Gathering to send project monitoring data, via their mobile devicesOne of the foundation’s longest-running programmes is Text2Teach, a nationwide initiative supported by Microsoft that aims to enhance the quality of education through the use of mobile technology. To date, more than 1,433 schools and 700,000 students have benefited from the programme, which provides teachers with easy access to multimedia educational materials via the Microsoft Education Delivery (MED) platform.
Ayala Foundation and Microsoft are now collaborating with partners and school administrators to scale up the Text2Teach programme in early 2015 by implementing it across all 38,000 public schools across the country.
As the initiative continues to expand, an effective monitoring platform is needed to demonstrate how the use of mobile technology via Text2Teach can help keep students engaged and to boost school performance.
Currently, around 4,000 teachers are using Microsoft Data Gathering to send data on performance indicators, project sustainability and other key information for measuring the programme’s impact at the school level. The foundation’s project teams will further extend the use of this tool to facilitate project monitoring.
Mei Ling Tan, Regional Sustainability Manager, Microsoft Mobile and Text2Teach Project Manager, said, "As we continue to scale up Text2Teach, it is important for project coordinators to demonstrate how the programme is contributing to community building and enriching the learning experience for students. Microsoft Data Gathering can significantly ease the burden of project monitoring.”
Over the past 10 years, Text2Teach has provided educational materials to more than 2,500 schools in the Philippines.In a recent report generated from data provided by 500 teachers, the foundation was able to demonstrate increased proficiency in English, maths and science in five provinces where Text2Teach is implemented—and a 58 percent reduction in dropout rates.
Runato ABasañes, Education Programme Supervisor for Text2Teach, said, “Microsoft Data Gathering is a great tool to collect data and track the improved outcomes of Text2Teach—without project coordinators personally visiting each of the hundreds of schools we are supporting. Teachers also find that the technology is very easy to use since the data can be transmitted easily.”