XiJEN College

buddy press website

Xijen College of Mountain Province has setup  ”Buddy Press” on the college’s official website (www.xijen.com).  BuddyPress is a social network application that can be embedded in a website.  School sites tend to be sources of information on courses offered, school activitities and final grades.   School sites tend to be straightforward and offer less interactivity.  BuddyPress will try to change this.  As mentioned in its website, www.buddypress.org : 

“BuddyPress is built to bring people together. It works well to enable people with similar interests to connect and communicate. Some of the fantastic uses might be:

• A campus wide social network for your university, school or college.
• An internal communication tool for your company.”

With this in mind, students of Xijen College who are familiar with Facebook can find a new social network service to explore-right on the college’s website.  The school administration will encourage teachers to use Buddy Press as an extension of their classes.  In Buddy Press, groups can be formed where discussions and working on projects, assignments can be done.   The application will also hope to encourage a more comprehensive interaction between groups or students and teachers.  Several support application have been integrated in Buddy Press and this includes a “like” button similar to Facebook’s, a photo album generator, documents/file sharing and more.

In the pages of BuddyPress.org, the site describes how New York Universityuses the application:

“The Academic Commons of The City University of New York is designed to support faculty initiatives and build community through the use of technology in teaching and learning.  The free exchange of knowledge among colleagues across the university is central to better educating the student body and expanding professional development opportunities for faculty research and teaching.

The site is found at http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/.”

IMPRESSIONS GATHERED ABOUT THE XIJEN COLLEGE OF MOUNTAIN PROVINCE
From three English classes on September 24, 2008

The XIJEN College of Mountain Province now has a beautiful building of its own, located at Caluttit. Many of the students are proud and thankful for having such a beautiful building. Many said that it is like a boarding place. The rooms are spacious, well-ventilated and always kept clean. The facilities are all new and well-kept. The ratio of the computers to the students is not like in the MPSPC where it is 4-6 students to one computer. Here the ratio is one to one. The surroundings of the college is conducive to learning. There’s not much noise coming from the vehicles along the road unlike its former place at the Poblacion. Many said that even if they pay higher tuition fees here, it is worth it because of the very good service that they get. Read the rest of this entry →

Last June 13, Xijen staff has to start preparing for the move to transfer at the new building at Upper Caluttit, Bontoc. The new school is supposed to be readied by June 16 but due to some instances, the start of classes resumed at main building so students have to make do with some opening day inconveniences.  Then on June 19, classes were suspended until Saturday for the staff to fix and prepare the rooms at the new building.

During the transfer from the rented classrooms from the early days of Xijen, it’s good that some students came to help in the move, carrying of computers and all the things for the office. Although there are still many more unfinished works on the building, students and staff entered on June 23 after attending an orientation last June 18.

After moving to the new building, it’s hard to make adjustments considering that everyday there’s always a schedule conflict either with rooms or time availability of students which has to be moved or solved.  The computers haven’t been fixed and IDs weren’t yet prepared. No wonder students started complaining on the changes of schedule and we have to give a meeting for concerned students regarding the conflicts and to apologize for the inconvenience caused by this problem.

After three weeks of our stay in this new building, there’s already an organized schedule and students have already adjusted to their new surroundings.  So welcome students and hope you’ll have a wonderful stay with us. God speed!

By: Maura L. Galaza