Promoting School Counseling Services Through Online Counseling

In school setting, counseling services are becoming unpopular among students. Students found school counseling services as a disciplinary action, disgrace, shame and other misconceptions that served as factors affecting their willingness to seek the service. As the technology arises, online counseling, which can potentially eliminate the said factors, is slowly becoming popular. This study investigated online counseling to help students utilize the school counseling services in order for them to share their issues, problems, concerns in different aspects of their lives through modern technology. Online counseling services in school setting is provided by the counselor by way of asynchronous communication, primarily to the clients. Asynchronous communication is the relay of information with a time lag. The client may reach the counselor through social media. A survey was conducted with 82 random students from Grade 7 to Grade 10 who experienced online counseling. Based on these results, students prefer online counseling than the traditional counseling because of the advantages that brought to them such as easy to access, convenient and it has anonymity. It is suggested that offering online counseling, in addition to traditional counseling services, could be an effective way for many students to increase the utilization of the services and thus better serve their communities.