Motivated by the positive feedback received from the special teachers, subject teachers
and visually impaired children, the participants of the workshop were encouraged to work
in small groups and develop instructional materials for about 50 additional concepts in
secondary level mathematics which were further edited and modified by the project
development team.
At this point in the projects evolution instructional materials were ready for about 250
concepts in mathematics but the project team still had to develop adaptation techniques
for another 250 concepts. The work commenced at the respective work places of the
project team and they exchanged information through electronic media. At every stage,
the feedback from teachers was obtained.
Two workshops – one consisting of special teachers working in inclusive settings and the
other consisting of mathematics teachers were conducted at the International Human
Resource Development Centre for the Disabled where the ICEVI Secretariat is located and
the suggestions provided by the participants were incorporated into the learning package.
Though many persons provided feedback to the materials included in the
package, especially to the sections on instructional materials and creative
mathematics, one person should be singled out for his generous support
and excellent technical assistance in writing the material. He is Mr. T.
Dharmarajan, a retired teacher of Mathematics who won the Best Teacher
Award from the President of India in 1998. Though he did not teach
children with visual impairment, he analytically looked at each concept from the perspective
of a non-visual learner. His contribution was immense and the project development team is
indebted to him for his significant support.
Planning of Master Trainers Workshop
Convinced that the approach adopted for the development of the package was sound, the
ON-NET setout to organize a workshop for selected teachers and teacher educators from the
Southeast Asia region to learn the entire mathematical package and get a feedback on how
it could be further refined before it was released as a learning package. Keeping in mind
the need to develop Master Trainers ON-NET proposed a three-week workshop using the
package for selected professionals from Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia the Philippines,
Thailand and Vietnam. Knowledge in mathematics, experience in teaching visually impaired
children and a working knowledge of English were used as the criteria to select participants.