Education Secretary Sonny Angara listens as Google employees show him features of the software that will help improve teaching and learning in classrooms. Benise Balaloing, ABS-CBN News

MANILA — Google is helping the Department of Education (DepEd) make teaching easier for more teachers nationwide.

At an event Monday, Education Assistant Secretary for ICT Marcelino Veloso said the tech giant has issued 1 million Google Workspace for Education Plus licenses --800,000 for teachers and 200,000 for non-teachers--so educators can now use "all of Google" in their classrooms.

Veloso said DepEd's partnership with Google also means there will be a free program for teaching teachers how to code.

"Now, teachers will be able to do something like inventory planning. They will be able to do tracking which students have attended which class," he said.

"So these are things that are now potential life savers for a teacher on the ground, who are often burdened with all of these administrative they can learn how to code to make their lives easier," he added.

Google said its Gemini Education add-on for Google Workspace can help teachers not only create lesson plans with the help of artificial intelligence but also help them with grading papers using an autograde tool. 

Google Workspace for Education can also help teachers identify students' pain points in learning, allowing them to tweak lesson plans to improve student performance.

Google also said its tools allow school directors and IT professionals to manage Chromebook devices issued to students.

Education Secretary Angara said this partnership is in line with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.'s directive for the government to take care of Philippine teachers.

"If you look back in history to the time when the Americans were here, there's a study of educational system called the Monroe report, and it's 1925 and their findings were, [the] educational system is overly centralized. Teachers are overloaded," he said.

"Just change the dates. It's not 1925, it's 2025, and you have the same problem. Some people never learn from history, it seems. But hopefully we're not those people," he stressed.

DepEd relieves teachers of administrative tasks

Angara said DepEd is looking forward to working with Google to help more teachers work with technology.

"You're up in the mountains or you're on some island, and teachers still have to encode the grades. They spend late nights encoding grades manually, when technology took care of that many years ago."

"They're also spending days doing lesson plans. Again, technology took care of that a long time. So how do we spread it out and roll it out at the quickest possibility?" he asked.

"President Marcos' instructions were to help our teachers and we want them to teach and improve the quality of our education. So, we have to unburden them also. And tech is the ultimate tool for unburdening our teachers of non-teaching tasks," he told journalists in an ambush interview.

For his part, Google for Education head of Asia Pacific Colin Marson said the partnership is critical to helping ease the burden on educators.

"From a personal level, when I go to these schools...you see these schools that maybe you have to drive and maybe sometimes hike to these schools... is it hard? Yes.Is it worth it? Definitely. And so I think that's part of the goal of our collaboration," he said.

DepEd to renew, hire some 7K admin support staff

"Are we going to solve everything? No. Are we going to solve a lot of things? Hopefully. Will it happen overnight? No. But it's a long-term collaboration and it's a goal that we have to achieve," he said.

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