The partnership overall has strong links with the target cohort of teachers in schools and with teacher training organisations to reach either those undertaking their initial teacher training or in-service training/CPD. These are the direct beneficiaries of this project. The real benefit for teachers are the new targeted training programmes enabling them to use hand held technologies in their mainstream teaching, which will be accredited as part of initial teacher training or as CPD. To date this has not been available.
MLEARN has been under development since April 2012 partners undertaking preliminary discussions with contacts through which MLEARN will be promoted to recruit schools, teachers and teacher training organisations.(refer to associate list of 79 organisations) The research report findings at month 4 (and later at month 12 after the training needs analysis has been completed with target cohorts) will be published within academic journals and circulated to teacher training institutions the second key target group in each country and shared with head teachers at the ESHA event in Dubrovnik in October 2014 in order to influence the design of teacher training at initial teacher training and for in-service training/CPD. This will be achieved by:
- developing the training initially with 5 expert teachers (1 from each country) who have knowledge and experience of integration of ICT in the classroom and possibly mlearning
- national experts will recruit a minimum of 20 teachers in each country to be trained, representing primary secondary and special schools with at least 5 different subject specialisms, and who will provide additional feedback to meet their national requirements.
- all teachers produce a case study of what they have learned, how they hope to use their new skills back in school produced in their own languages and English to be used to engage more schools and encourage more teacher training providers to integrate this training into their existing provision
- Handheld technologies used in 10 different schools reaching initially at least 150 pupils in each country to provide evidence of comprehensive testing
- Each partner to ensure that the results of the project are shared in their own country with at least 100 teachers from schools and teacher training organisations via workshops and through access to the blended / elearning web site and partner web sites.
The project is using teachers as change agents, to change the dynamics in the way pupils of all ages learn, inside and outside of the classroom. The difference this project will make is that it is trained teachers who will facilitate the change in the classroom, rather than adhoc projects being led by enthusiastic individuals. The change to be achieved is in embedding mobile technologies (handhelds) within mainstream education by empowering teachers through their own skills development to use them as a mainstream teaching resource. This in turn will enable young people and other learners to actively participate in the co-creation and co-construction of resources and approaches to issues and challenges that affect them in their everyday lives.
