GENERAL SANTOS CITY (MindaNews/ 4 October) — The city government is pushing for the establishment of electronic libraries or e-Library in all public elementary and secondary schools here in a bid to provide students and even teachers with wider access to various educational references and related learning materials.
Percival Pasuelo, executive assistant for information technology of the city mayor’s office, said they have launched the “e-Library for public schools” project to assist local public schools in developing their own e-Libraries and eventually adopt them as part of their regular learning systems.
“This is part of our efforts to enhance the learning systems in local public schools through information and communication technology,” he said.
Pasuelo, who heads the city government’s enhanced SHEEP-Computer Literacy Program (CLP), said the e-Libraries will be put up in all public schools that have operational speech-computer laboratories that were provided by the local government.
SHEEP stands for Social Transformation, Human Empowerment, Economic Diversification, Environment Security and Regeneration and Participatory Governance and Transparency, which are the city’s main development thrusts.
Under the project, which was piloted last week at the speech and computer laboratory of the Alternative Learning System-Dadiangas West, Pasuelo said SHEEP-CLP personnel will assist the establishment of the e-Libraries as well as the maintenance of their databases.
He said the e-Libraries will initially be installed with electronic books or e-books and audiobooks that were compiled by the SHEEP-CLP team since July last year.
“Around 3,000 files or books are now available for consumption out of our collections,” he said.
Pasuelo said they adopted the “offline file sharing” concept for the e-book collection that will be included in the e-Libraries.
He said anybody may donate an e-book through their office, which has put up a repository or database for the e-Library.
The SHEEP-CLP team will handle the maintenance and periodic updating of all the files stored in the repository, he said.
Pasuelo said they included audiobooks in their collection to offer a unique reading and listening experience to students.
“That is, while the e-book is being read, an audio file may be played synchronizing the reading and listening experience. This way, the concentration span of the readers will be enhanced through the sound effects produced by the audio files,” he said.
Since most of the audio books were recorded in English American accent, Pasuelo said the students may also learn the correct pronunciation of the words, increasing their reading comprehension. (Allen V. Estabillo/MindaNews)