Taking full advantage of the many uses of mobile technologies in education, SEAMEO INNOTECH initiated the development of a teacher resource kit utilizing smart phones and tablets to promote the development of 21st century skills. The resource kit is designed to bridge the digital divide between students and teachers who are referred to by author Marc Prensky as “digital natives” and “digital immigrants,” respectively.
The project focuses on training teachers to utilize mobile technologies for their personal and professional growth, and, at the same time, helping promote the development of higher order thinking skills (HOTS) in themselves and among their students.
Composed of a web portal and a set of eBooks, the resource kit is part of SEAMEO INNOTECH’s project on Mobile Technology for Teachers, or MT4T (previously known as Teacher Resource Kit Using Mobile Technology for 21st Century (TRK-MT21) Learning in Southeast Asia), which supports the competency on facilitating 21st century teaching and learning specified in SEAMEO INNOTECH’s Competency Framework for Southeast Asian Teachers in the 21st Century. The resource kit was officially launched in the Philippines on 24 October 2014. The resource kit was also launched in selected countries in Southeast Asia following a series of orientation sessions for primary and secondary teachers from partner schools in Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The MT4T resource kit contains a set of eBooks that (1) cover topics about popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Edmodo; (2) provide examples, best practices, guides and tips on how to make full use of mobile devices in education; (3) provide hundreds of annotated resources related to 21st century resources and tools, as well as HOTS; and (4) give background information about the MT4T project, the technical conceptual framework of the teacher resource kit, and the key MT4T concepts and themes.
SEAMEO INNOTECH partnered with a private company (Vibe Technologies) to develop an e-reader to be used with the e-books. The SEAMEO INNOTECH Reader run on iOS, Android, and Windows, and may be downloaded from the respective app stores.
Following the series of pilot testing and consultations with several Ministries of Education in Southeast, MT4T undergone refinements and will soon be released throughout Southeast Asia.
