Seasons Greetings!

16.12.2011 UNESCO Asia-Pacific Regional Bureau for Education (UNESCO Bangkok) is pleased to invite all our readers to celebrate together the end of another successful year of implementing ICT in education. It would have been impossible without the support from every single one of you teachers, students, policy makers, government officials, teacher educators, IT experts, international agencies, and many more. Thank you all. In 2011, UNESCO Bangkok collaborated with partners at various levels to help create a new culture of teaching and learning with support of ICT, ranging from national policy to institution to individual levels. At the national policy level, UNESCO Bangkok, in collaboration with Intel, World Bank and KERIS, organized the 2nd Asia-Pacific Ministerial Forum on ICT in Education (AMFIE) in Manila, Philippines on 12-14 July. Thirty-eight high level officials from 19 countries participated in the Forum and showcased a number of promising models and experiences in adopting and monitoring ICT in Education policies and practices. The International Symposium on ICT in Education: Potential and Lessons Learnt was another policy-level event that took place in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia on 12-13 September to meet the growing needs from the Central East Asia region. This was done in partnership with the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of Mongolia. This year, UNESCO Bangkok likewise assisted the Governments of Maldives, Bangladesh, and Nepal in developing their respective ICT in Education Master Plans. In addition, with support from UNESCO Bangkok and expert guidance from international models, the Peoples Republic of China is developing its own set of ICT in Education Indicators and e-School Standards. At the institutional level, UNESCO Bangkok continued to support teacher education institutions in the region to build and strengthen the institutional capacity in integrating ICT into pre-service teacher training programmes. The 5th Deans Forum (Hong Kong, 6-8 June) brought in Deans

from 35 TEIs and MOE officials from 15 countries to discuss the important roles of leadership in effectively reforming the education system and curricula for the 21st century. Some of UNESCOs ICT-integrated curriculum development workshops for pre-service teacher training have borne meaningful fruits this year, including national-level pre-service curriculum development for Cambodia and the Philippines as well as a successful curriculum reform at Hanoi National Institute of Education and Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology. A number of ICT-integrated curriculum reform cases from TEIs will be showcased through an e-publication entitled ICT Curriculum Development for Pre-Service Teacher Education: Cases and Lessons Learned ", to come out in January 2012. At the individual level, which mainly aims to benefit teachers, UNESCO Bangkok either organized or supported workshops for in-service teachers in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand, DPRK and Mongolia to facilitate ICT-pedagogy integration for in-service teachers, focusing on how to design and implement project-based learning with tele-collaboration. This was made possible by generous support from the Korea Funds-in-Trust. As a means to sustain and promote the trained teachers enactment of the PBL approaches in their curriculum, UNESCO Bangkok organized the Regional Seminar on Innovative ICT Practices in Teaching and Learning in Bangkok, 3-5 October. Along with interesting and promising cases on innovative classroom practices, the Seminar also called teachers and teacher educators attention to emerging issues on ICT in education, such as child cyber safety and using social media for learning. Read through some interesting articles by teachers from Bangladesh, China, and Thailand where they shared their experiences in implementing projects and tele-collaboration in their respective schools. The year concluded with the 15th UNESCO-APEID International Conference held from 6-8 December in Jakarta. Asia and the Pacific region is one of the most heterogeneous regions in the world when it comes to the use of ICT (ITU, 2011). On the one hand, some countries in East Asia has advanced to the 3rd or 4th stages of ICT in Education Master Plan and moving forward to using ICT to transform the education. On the other hand, some of the least developed countries do not even have sufficient supply of electricity. However, we strongly believe that we can turn such challenges into opportunities. By providing collaborative platforms for the member states to benchmark the development and share their lessons learned, we hope and trust that countries of various context will not only harness innovative approaches but also be able to foresee latent challenges in planning and implementing ICT in education programmes and prevent them from repeating trials and errors that developed countries have already been through. In the years to come, UNESCO Bangkok foresees the ever-growing demands on the effective use of ICT to promote and enhance not only school-based education but also non-formal education, life long learning, education for the marginalized population thereby eventually aiming for the effective use of ICT to support education for all. Continuing the endeavor, in 2012, UNESCO Bangkok plans to stress on supporting member states the value of building smart educational policies that will guide them in the selection and adoption of appropriate ICT educational applications relevant to their own contexts, including 1:1 tablet/smart learning, mobile technology to promote access and equity of education, and open educational resources to support quality higher education.

Again, UNESCO Bangkok would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your support, inspiration and participation. We wish you all the best for a happy and healthy New Year. Reference:

Information Telecommuncation Union. (2011). Measuring the Information Society.