'It's a matter of how to motivate them (teachers),' said Montejo, who was among a group of high school principals who visited Metro Manila recently for the launch of the Smart Schools Web site.

By motivation, Montejo is most certainly not speaking of teachers finding the proverbial greener pasture, either through online dating or other means by which the Internet can be used. Even if he thinks 90 percent of teachers in his school already know how to write e-mail. Out of a faculty of 190 teachers, half of them range from 22 to 36 years old, which is young by public school standards.

Said Montejo: 'The primary motivation is to make their work a lot easier.' By this, he means simply doing away with time-consuming tasks like encoding student grades and preparing all sorts of forms manually.