C3 Around the World, Mexico Case Study
C3 Micro-Cloud is helping to achieve excellence in Mexico’s schools
Integrating technology with the classroom using the C3 Micro-Cloud
Mexico is a geographically, ethnically, and linguistically diverse country with an estimated population of over 129 million people. It is the most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world.
The country suffers from economic inequality. In some regions, many families earn a comfortable living, but, especially in southern Mexico, many people live in poverty. This inequality is also felt in the education system: in rural regions educational participation and attainment rates are extremely low when compared with Mexico City. While the illiteracy rate is around 2% in Mexico City, it rises to 14% when compared to the state of Chiapas (southern Mexican state), where they face Mexico’s highest illiteracy level.
The education challenges can be seen in students’ school achievement. Mexico performs below the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and development) average in science (416 score points), reading (423 score points) and mathematics (408 score points). These may be a result of the fact that historically, only 51% of the students have access to Internet, mostly in the central and northern regions of the country, widening the opportunity gap between those that have technology access and those that don’t.
Improving Mexico’s education system is critical for addressing problems like high unemployment rates among Mexican youths, who are unemployed at twice the rate of the overall working age population. In recognition of this issue, an education reform program was enacted in 2018 where, among other measures, an objective was defined to leverage technology in the classroom as a way to give students access to new content and learning methods. Technology companies, such as Google.org made donations for technology renovations, in order to try to reduce the Digital Divide between the different states of the country.
In 2018, Critical Links and Internet Movil, a Mexican IT company, established a partnership that made it possible to send 800+ C3 Micro-Clouds to Mexican schools, making it possible to leverage digital content, videos, lessons and learning management systems, among others.
Some C3 Micro-Clouds were also sent to well-resourced schools that wanted to improve their education level, as they found it possible to further increase their levels of educational excellence with the micro-cloud approach. One of those schools is Instituto El Pedrogal, a Catholic school in Ciudad López Mateos, in Mexico City State. Although the school already has an above average quality of education, teachers and administrators recognized the effectiveness of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in schools, and believe that integrating technology in the classroom increases students’ motivation and retention, helping them to achieve excellence in education.
Gabriela Barcena Muñoz is one of the Instituto El Pedrogal teachers who understands the role of ICT as a powerful tool to be used in the renovation of teaching methods, “As a teacher, the C3 Micro-Cloud helped me a lot and enabled the students to learn more, with better results. We use C3’s capability and speed to share valuable information among ourselves. Students use their mobile devices to access the information and we noticed that they retain more and better understand the content taught.” Gabriela Muñoz also mentioned that, “The C3 Micro-Cloud is a very user friendly appliance that helped my students to have a better, and more meaningful learning experience.”
Many books used in Mexico schools have not been updated for more than a decade. With C3 Cloud Control (a cloud-based portal for the creation, selection, curation, and distribution of content) students can learn now using the most current and appealing content, such as videos, e-books and learning games.
A student said, “Thanks to the C3 Micro-Cloud, I now learn math better. With its videos and examples it is much easier to understand.” Another student also mentioned that, “With C3, science classes are more fun and it is easier to share information with my colleagues when we are doing assignments.”
At Critical Links, we believe that is possible to encourage new and better forms of learning and reasoning, in this case taking the Mexican Educational System to the next level and having a huge impact on the students’ futures!
With the C3 Micro-Cloud it became possible to encourage other forms of learning and reasoning, taking the Mexican Educational System to the next level.
By Critical Links #connectingstudentstoknowledge