THE UNITED Nation’s Children’s Education Fund in partnership with the Department of Education, Fundación Educación y Cooperación and Smart Communications, Inc. turned over “School in a Bag”, a portable digital classroom package, to 50 schools in Northern Samar and Samar.

The School in a Bag includes a laptop and Smart LTE Pocket WiFi for teachers and 10 tablets for students with educational apps in local languages, teachers guides, USB and flash drives and other gadgets.

The learning package is preloaded with digital educational materials to make learning more engaging, such as gamified Learning Activity Sheets and #Learn Smart apps for mother-tongue-based literacy and numeracy learning.

Students are expected to bring home the tablets pre-installed with learning materials to supplement their learning activities.

Teachers will use the laptops to download digital learning materials and engage in online professional development training including the use of Learning Action Cell session guides produced by DepEd with UNICEF’s support.

The bags were distributed to schools in isolated, underserved and sparsely populated areas to ensure access to good quality education.

“We hope that the School in a Bag will support the DepEd’s distance learning modality and motivate students to keep learning despite a challenging context brought by the pandemic,” UNICEF Deputy Representative Behzad Noubary said.

The distribution is part of DepEd, UNICEF and Educo’s “Covid19 Recovery Programme for Children in Multigrade Schools in the Philippines” to improve access to education.