United Way Worldwide (UWW) is currently collecting heartwarming stories from our local partners and beneficiaries who are participating in the Shinhan S² Bridge Vietnam. This is Tripath’s story.
” I am a representative teacher of Bat Xat Secondary & High School for Ethnic Minorities, Bat Xat district, Lao Cai province, and participated in the Schools.vn school administration program within the framework of the Shinhan S² Bridge Vietnam project.
The overall goal of the Shinhan S² Bridge Vietnam project is to support communities in Vietnam to access innovative technology solutions, create new opportunities to be able to solve social problems, including education. Accordingly, the participation and coordination of Tripath Vietnam Company – the owner of the Schools.vn school management program model in the Shinhan S² Bridge Vietnam project, has provided free support for the automatic attendance system through the student cards with integrated many attractive functions of the school management application platform. It acts as an effective connection between teachers, parents, and students to ensure that children better participate in learning, and help them improve their health and academic performance. As a school located in a disadvantaged mountainous area in Lao Cai province whose facilities are still lacking and education as well as administration quality is still limited, we haven’t been given sufficient opportunities to access modern technology tools and solutions. Therefore, when we learned about the Schools.vn school management program and the Shinhan S² Bridge Vietnam project, understood the desires and values that the project can bring, we saw it as not only a useful initiative to help us in improving the education quality significantly but also an opportunity to apply advanced technology into the management process. That is the reason why we decided to take part in this project.
Before participating in the Shinhan S² Bridge Vietnam project and receiving the aid package from the Schools.vn school management program, our school had not had the opportunity to take advantage of technology equipment in a number of aspects. The school used to manage students’ data and scores, build timetables, check student attendance and other operations entirely by manual paper or by simple conventional office tools such as Word, Excel.
Upon participating in the project, our school has been provided with a set of hardware devices (attendance checking devices, monitor screens, student cards) with integrated software applications (website and mobile applications). This is an extremely useful solution not only for teachers and administrators like me, but also for parents and students.
- For teachers: The Schools.vn application has provided a lot of features that helps manage all aspects of the school, minimize time, human resources and costs in the most optimal way. For example, with the automatic attendance checking feature, we no longer have to spend time filling in attendance sheets manually and rewrite the record in the notebook. The real time attendance of the students can be quickly updated through a set of hardware devices and software applications. In addition, the integration of education administration functions and timetable management feature into a single platform has helped teachers and schools to synchronize data, optimize the management and statistics without losing time and human resources to get used to multiple software at the same time.
- For parents and students: Schools.vn application is a quick and transparent bridge between school and family. Similar to teachers, parents only need to access the application to know the status of their children. Moreover, this is similar to a mini social network within which we can quickly exchange students’ learning progress with parents. Parents can also look up their children’s learning performance as well as interact with the school representatives easily.
Our memorable experience was that after 1 month participating in the Shinhan S² Bridge Vietnam project, the Covid 19 epidemic situation complicatedly spread across the country.
Schools were closed due to social distancing, which temporarily halted all ongoing activities. At that time, it seemed that the project would not be able to continue. Fortunately, the Schools.vn program team has made some adjustments to the software training plan when shifting from face-to-face training at school to online training to cope with the epidemic situation.
At first, as we were not competent or even barely knew how to use online applications, we were quite worried about the idea of distance training. However, the trainers from the Schools.vn program team, whom we often affectionately refer to as “teachers”, developed a detailed plan and enthusiastically guided us to facilitate the training sessions. Before each training session, the program team always provided us with related materials and step-by-step instructions for better preparation. Therefore, we were able to attend the training session without any difficulty.
On top of that, we greatly appreciate the efforts and enthusiasm of the instructors during the training session as they conveyed the content very clearly, coherently, and enthusiastically answered every question. The training session took place for only half a day, but 98% of the teachers receiving training were able to absorb the knowledge and have become competent in the use of important features of the software. And we also appreciate the positive attitude of the program developers toward improvement as they are always willing to receive technical suggestions and comment. There have been many unexpected obstacles during the implementation process, however, with the efforts of all parties, the participation in Shinhan S² Bridge Vietnam has become an extremely memorable and meaningful journey for us.”
