DEPLOYING MOBILE MENTORING INTERVENTIONS IN INITIAL TEACHER EDUCATION: A REVIEW OF THE MAKMENTOR APP DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
Abstract
One of the strategies, which can be used to advance the quality of teacher preparation, is mentoring. Although it is often difficult to effectively enact the process of mentoring teacher trainees during practicum, due to the dispersed locations of teacher trainees in practicum schools countrywide, the authors suggest that utilization of mobile technologies has potential to leverage the process. Following this proposition, a mobile application development tool was used to develop a mentoring app named “Makmentor App”. This tool was deployed to provide mentorship to different groups of Makerere University teacher-trainees during practicum. The process of deploying the app was informed by Design-Based Thinking and Koole (2009) Framework for Rational Analysis of Mobile Education – (FRAME). The main potential of Makmentor App was in its ability to bridge the communication gap by facilitating synchronous and asynchronous communication between and among teacher trainees and mentors as well as provision of critical subject-related content that could be accessed by teacher trainees anywhere anytime on a mobile phone.
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References
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https://www.appmakr.com/ Accessed on 13th November,2014
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejes.v0i0.320
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