Seameo Innotech News Archive

WORKSHOP ON USING ICT FOR HIV/AIDS PREVENTIVE EDUCATION

Under the project ICT & HIV/AIDS Preventive Education in the Cross-Border Areas of the Greater Mekong Sub-region, the training and materials development workshop for a group of country trainers was conducted by SEAMEO INNOTECH for two weeks in June. This starts off the series of country workshops that will make learning materials on HIV/AIDS prevention available to lower secondary students in high-risk borders of Cambodia, Lao PDR, Vietnam, Thailand and Yunnan Province in China.

During the workshop at SEAMEO INNOTECH, the trainers worked on the development of prototype ICT-enhanced HIV/AIDS preventive education learning materials and utilization strategies. The main concern was to explore strategies for using ICT to improve existing HIV/AIDS preventive education strategies and learning materials.

The sample materials and strategies will be further refined in the participating countries, with continuing technical assistance from the SEAMEO INNOTECH team. Refinements will include the translation of the English-language prototypes developed during the training into the language of the end-users. Supplemental local materials based on these prototypes will be developed by teachers and learners in the project sites.

The collection of learning materials will be shared across the different schools and project sites. This may involve study visits and on-line discussion groups between and among SEAMEO staff, country teams and schoolteachers. SEAMEO INNOTECH will maintain a Web-based help desk to facilitate continuing technical assistance and dialogue with country trainers.

The training workshop for country trainers covered essential generic competencies on the use of ICT for HIV/AIDS preventive education material development and utilization. The country trainers will be responsible for training the lower secondary school teachers in the project sites. The type of materials to be developed will depend on what ICT tools will be available locally to the teachers and students.

The workshop focused on four technologies: word processing for producing interactive print materials; electronic spreadsheet for producing assessment materials; presentation application for interactive teacher presentations and students’ self-learning materials; and, video, for short attention-getting and reinforcement messages.

Simulation exercises for the training of teachers as well as demonstrations on using the materials in the classroom were done to assess the materials and the strategies. Digitized content resources were distributed to the participants to facilitate in-country enrichment of the prototypes.

The main activities of the workshop included:

• A review of instructional design in relation to HIV/AIDS prevention, focused on how interactivity can be integrated into print, video and computer–generated instructional materials.

• A review of content resources available for priority topics, based on materials that participants brought with them and resources made available by SEAMEO INNOTECH.

• Production planning based on priority topics, instructional design and content resources. Participants planned the materials they would produce and organized the resources to be used in the actual workshops.

• Production workshops for developing the prototypes enabled the participants to gain ICT skills while producing content-focused materials. Throughout the workshops, refe-rence materials on content of HIV/AIDS preventive education were made available to participants.

The participants also visited the Remedios AIDS Foundation, one of the Philippines’ most active non-government organizations working in the sexual and reproductive health sector, to look at samples of HIV/AIDS information, education and communi-cation materials.

The outputs of the workshop included a training manual for teachers on the production and use of ICT-based instructional materials for HIV/AIDS prevention; a compilation of prototype materials on HIV/AIDS preventive education for use in secondary school classrooms; resource materials to be used in further enhancement and enrichment of prototype learning materials produced; and action plans to thresh out the next steps after the training.