Udon Education Foundation (UEF)
The idea behind the Udon Education Foundation (UEF) is to provide an education service that is not being addressed. By having Foundation status any profit must be put back into the organization in furtherance of its mission. To the donor, foundation status often means tax deductible. Our mission is to be a resource for the community and to make "student-centered" learning a reality. It all came about after a group of concerned educators, parents and local business people decided to break with tradition and experiment with new innovative ideas and technology in order to provide better education to their children and all children, wherever they may be. It's an education center that caters for the individual. The foundation aims to provide a personalized service that takes care of the needs of the individual. It means that all of our efforts are focused on the learner, transforming the teacher into a learning facilitator
UEF is situated at 19/4 Jamnusorn Road, opposite Udon Wittaya School, just off Prajak Road. It's about two city blocks from Central Plaza in the direction of the "clock tower" roundabout in the center of Udon Thani, an important city in the Northeast of Thailand, about 70 km. Students have the opportunity to use the latest voice recognition software based on SPHINX from Carnegie-Mellon University, Teacher-Student-Reporting (TSR) from UEF, "Moodle" lesson management from Australia, LINUX, Apache, PHP, JAVA, RUBY, and MySQL from all over the world. All are shareware and all are free. We are also "field-testing" this software on real students at a real school in rural Udon Thani Province. Our objective to make all of this fee to everyone. UEF's efforts are organized into a number of "Tracks", each with a specific focus and timetable. Among these is teacher training and TESOL membership for education professionals. You can pick a track you like and work only with those people, if that suits you. MM Publications and their Thailand distributor Book Access
Book Access, the Thai distributor for MM Publications made an 850,000 baht charitable donation of educational materials to UEF. They donated about 7,140 books covering about 90 titles. This level of English is suitable for anyone. A big thank you goes out to Book Access, the Thai distributor for MM Publications for their charitable donation of educational materials to UEF. Due to their generosity it will be possible to equip schools in the province and beyond with the resources they need to teach English in line with the Thai curriculum. For the Pop-Up series, which is composed of 24 books covering the first 6 years of school, UEF has analyzed two years or 8 books. They have been turned into self-study books which are student-centered. The instructions for each lesson have been translated into Thai with a provision for using other national languages as well, such as Lao, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Malay, Chinese, etc. Each book contains 24 lessons, thus for the first 192 lessons, instructions have been written, translated into Thai, and proofed. English scripts have been written to support voice recognition (VR). It was during this analysis that we discovered the nature of the "gap" which teachers are required to fill in order to make a lesson teachable to students. This gap is at the center of the current teacher-centered system. We have spanned the gap for the first 192 lessons. The teacher becomes a facilitator. Many people look to the teacher as the ultimate consumer, not the student, that's wrong. "Smooth Transitions"
A series of scripts, videos, books, and teacher analysis of language have been prepared to support the first 6 years of English education. The books exactly match the videos. The scripts have been entered into commercial voice recognition software, based on "EDU-Speak" from Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, USA. Notice that the translations are always isolated so that other national languages can be used with this same format. A series of scripts, videos, books, and teacher analysis of language have been prepared to support the first 6 years of English education. Voice Recognition at UEF
We are building a free, open-source alternative for voice recognition using a complete set of open-source components. All are on a "stick" or any suitable computer media. About 75% of the students in Asia do not have the Internet. We must work around this problem. In Korea, Internet availability may be very, very high, but in Indonesia and India, it's very, very low. For the past several years we have tried commercial software with little success, specifically "EDU-Speak" from Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Eventually we used it for a formal research project. Then we discovered; that when native speakers scored 95%+ speaking a script correctly, the software accepted as "correct" a simple "hum" for each word 60%+ of the time. Something was very, very wrong. Students had already discovered this. A simple "hum" made research results of very little value. They also made tests unreliable, severely impacting the teaching effort. And we couldn't do anything about it. The vendor (Teaching Machines Incorporated, Oakland, California) was not very interested in fixing the problem and the originator of the system (SRI of Menlo Park, California), was completely uninterested. We were forced to look for alternatives. We are building an alternative system that will be free and that can be changed. The system incorporates teacher materials we've already developed and allows others to add anything that runs on a computer. That's what open-source means. Very importantly, we are incorporating Teacher-Student-Reporting (TSR) which we developed for another system. It's matured to Version 3. Version 4 will go into our voice recognition system. Here's what's included. EnVR a pronunciation dictionary of about 150,000 English words that drives the voice recognition system. It was created exclusive at UEF. It's free and open. TSR a teacher-student reporting system, a very detailed reporting system written at UEF by an English teacher from the USA who has a computer background. Sphinx a voice recognition system from Carnegie-Melon University, Pittsburgh PA about 1995. Moodle a Lesson Management System, out of Australia in 2002. MySQL a database management system, originating in Sweden,
Linux a computer operating system originating in Finland. Apache a communications management software system, originated in the USA. Firefox a web browser that manages the monitor or tablet display hardware. PHP a programming language that prepares materials for display upon a monitor or tablet, originating in Denmark/Greenland/Canada/Israel about 1995, favored by Moodle. Java a programming language originating in the USA about 1995. RUBY a programming language originating in the Japan about 1995. Bantatprachanukoon School
From the bottom up: A case study of teacher training for primary school teachers of English in a Thai school in Northeastern Thailand
For this case study to be productive, it was important to have a school that would be classed as a typical example of rural education. This is not an easy task, as the idea of conducting research and applying new innovations is intimidating to many school directors. What was needed was a school director and his administrative superiors who had vision and leadership, who wanted to be part of innovation and not merely as bystanders. Through constant networking and an element of luck, contact was made with Mr. Channarong Rachbuanoy at the 12th English in South-East Asia (ESEA) conference at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT) in Bangkok during December 2007. He was completing his Master of Arts degree in the field of Applied Linguistics. He was employed at a school in Udon Thani province, about 75 kilometers from Udon Thani and was prepared to speak to his school director, Mr. Sa-neh Boonsaeng of Bantatprachanukoon School about the possibility of conducting research into a transitional phase of communicative activities and learner centeredness in the classroom. Full scale change from teacher centered to learner centered learning has not successfully taken place across Thailand, so a transitional phase is what this project needs. Bantatprachanukoon School in Ban Phue district in Udon Thani province, Northeastern Thailand, has 347 students from nursery to grade nine. It's approximately due west of Nong Khai and near the Mekong River. The project focuses on grades 1-6 (Prathom 1-6). It's typical of Thailand and most of rural Asia where hundreds of millions people, maybe even billions, live
Bantat is spirited but poor. Some of the kids, who don't have much to start with, will become the future teachers of a future generation. In a dynamic, ever changing system, which education is, the system produces its own replacements. UEF is working with local people to slowly redirect that system. The Original Team
Mr. Channarong Rachbuanoy – Coordinator
Mr. Manop Yasoonthorn – Prathom 2
Ms. Sasicha Pawasri – Prathom 3
Ms. Pranee Boonsaeng – Prathom 1
Mr. Nikom Jaidee – Prathom 3 (not in picture)
The materials used for this project include "Smooth Transitions", cartoons, and Voice Recognition
Prathom One
Prathom Two
Prathom Three
Prathom Four
Prathom Five
Prathom Six DVDs and books
are available from UEF. The Prathom videos
can be downloaded from:
http://www.steves-english-zone.com
Primary School English Language Teachers
The majority of primary school English language teachers in Thailand have not been trained to teach English and hold qualifications in other disciplines such as Thai language, physical education and home ec
