Tablets Instead of Blackboards in Northern School

 | Tue 4 Mar 2014 10:56 ICT

CityNews – With support from Chiang Mai Provincial Administrative Organization, Chiang Mai University and Intel Microelectronics (Thailand), a school in the Fang District (a small northern district of Thailand that borders Myanmar) has brought 90 educational tablets into their prathom-2 classrooms.

The school, Rattana Auewittaya School, reports that the tablets are being used by both students and teachers across six different subjects: Math, English, Chinese, Thai, Science and Social Studies.

One English teacher at the school says, “Our students are happy learning this way. And also, we are happy teaching students with tablets because it empowers us to create a lot of teaching patterns.”

The school has also been provided with teacher training for developing new courseware for the tablets as well as a CCTV feed that allows the director of the school to monitor progress in the classroom. The collected footage will be used by the director, as well as by students at Chiang Mai University, to gauge the effectiveness of the tablets.

The use of technology in Thai classrooms is hardly consistent across the country. Where some schools might have access to smart boards and projectors in every classroom, a school not twenty minutes down the road might only have access to one projector for the entire school or no technology at all. This disparity means progress across Thai schools is stagnant—in this modern age, technology is no longer a mere luxury, it is a tool that if wielded responsibly, can be used to great benefit for students and teachers alike. The great hope for a project like this is that, if successful, it will be implemented in schools throughout the country.