Top elem, HS students pit skills in DepEd 'Festival of Talents'

This week in Puerto Princesa City and Iloilo City, the Department of Education (DepEd) gathered top-performing elementary and high students from public and private schools nationwide to compete in tournaments in various subject areas, including campus journalism, foreign languages, arts and technology education. Digital literacy through campus journalism is the emphasis of this year's National Schools Press Conference from April 9 - 13 in Puerto Princesa, where school paper editors and writers test their mettle in various competition categories: editorial writing; news writing; feature writing; sports writing; copyreading and headline writing; editorial cartooning; and photojournalism. Seventeen 'pilot high schools' implementing the DepEd's Special Program in Journalism will also compete in the 'Radyo Magnifico' scriptwriting and radio broadcasting contest. Oratorical contests in Spanish, Japanese, French, German and Chinese are the main highlights of the Special Program in Foreign Language (SPFL) component of the Festival of Talents. The SPFL program also includes costume play (cosplay), games and a food festival. The Tagisan ng Talino sa Wika at Panitikan will see Balagtasan champions from the country's 17 regions competing. Over in Iloilo City from April 10 - 13, the DepEd is staging its Technolympics, National POPQUIZ, Sining Pambansa, and on-the-spot contests on Population and Development. In a recent education forum, DepEd Secretary Armin Luistro said lessons learned from the implementation of the 'special programs' serve as inputs to the development of the K-12 curriculum. - ELR/KBK, GMA News