Students of Tisa National High School test the computers with Quipper School, an e-learning platform that allows teachers to give assignments, quizzes and other activities online. Both teachers and students access Quipper through Facebook. (CDN PHOTO/JUNJIE MENDOZA)
With no new classrooms, Tisa National High School (NHS) has found a different way to cope with the increasing number of students.
The school partnered last year with e-learning startup Quipper, which has designed an online classroom management platform named “Quipper School,” replete with lessons, “game-fied” assignments and tests based on the K-12 national curriculum.
“Quipper School has really helped us in streamlining our school schedules for each year level because we can maximize our time spent with our students in each class,” said Gerome Misa, principal of Tisa NHS during the press launch of Quipper at the campus.
The press launch was held to celebrate the success of Quipper at Tisa NHS, and also to launch Quipper’s plans of reaching out to more schools in Cebu City and Cebu Province.
Quipper School can be accessed when teachers sign up using their Facebook accounts and register their school at “school.quipper.com.”
Students are then invited to sign up through Facebook as well, and are sent unique codes by their teachers to access a particular class.
Once the students are in the class, teachers can send them assignments, quizzes and activities, which are paired with short lessons and reviews.
Every time students get a correct answer for an item in a quiz, they earn “gold coins” which allow them to tweak their accounts on Quipper.
Scores are immediately collated in one page, together with time duration for each quiz item.
MESSAGING
The platform also has a messaging system to allow students to actively communicate with their teachers outside of class in case they need to clarify certain details about their lessons.
“Quipper School really allowed teachers to make classes more efficient for our students, and it is much easier to catch up with our syllabus as well,” said Elvira de Guzman, Quipper coordinator for Tisa NHS.
De Guzman, who discovered the platform late in 2014, shared how she used Quipper School’s limited content back then to speed up their classes and help students understand content in a fun way.
In 2015, Quipper, which has presence in over 33 Department of Education (DepEd) divisions all over the country, partnered with Tisa NHS through DepEd to give them access to full content for free, after hearing how De Guzman used the limited version to make things work.
Now, all the students in Tisa NHS have been using Quipper School for majority of their subjects, such as Araling Panlipunan, Filipino, Reading & Writing, Philippine Literature and World Literature, among others.
PROBLEMS
Gilbert Tito, an English teacher at Tisa NHS, said the students initially struggled with having to look for Internet access for daily assignments.
Parents began to complain, so the school asked the teachers to shift from daily assignments to weekly ones so that the students will have more time to answer and access the platform’s content.
Their computer laboratory, which can handle one class at a time, has been improved, and the school devised a system to allow a class one hour at the laboratory to do their work.
Misa, principal of Tisa NHS, said they have asked the local government unit to provide Wi-Fi connection in the entire campus so students can access Quipper through their phones and other gadgets.
“There really has to be unity and coordination between the school, the local government of Cebu and in the barangay, the parents, and the students to make ventures like Quipper really be effective and helpful,” said Misa.
Yuki Naotori, Quipper country manager in the Philippines, said the dedication of Filipino schools to use Quipper has inspired them to develop Quipper Video, a premium video service, for Filipino students in Grades 10 and 11. “We introduce this new feature this year, to also help ease the transition for the introduction of Senior High in the Philippines,” Naotori said.
Quipper Video allows students to access a library of over 265 video lessons, at P300-P500 per user. Later this year, Quipper Video will be expanded to include more grade levels in the Philippines.
“We are very happy to have helped students, especially like these students here in Tisa National High School, who are dedicated to learning.
This is what motivates us here at Quipper to continue providing schools with chances at a better education,” Naotori said.