Development of Smart Library System for Thailand's Primary School Teachers

Abstract

The Office of the Basic Education Commission of Thailand (OBEC) has a decentralized structure organized into secondary school and primary school levels. At each level, there are several public schools, some of which share similar responsibilities. Therefore, a simple way has not existed to link all the schools so that they can share their knowledge and collaborate in order to expand instruction and the role of practitioners. The creation of a digital knowledge repository or smart library addresses this problem by providing teachers with tools and data movements to encourage the exchange of informal wisdom between them. Smart libraries are essential educational infrastructures for primary schools in Thailand. An adequately dimensioned digital knowledge repository can increase teaching impact and enhance school instruction through its academic outputs. This paper describes developing a smart school library web application for Thailand's primary school teachers using the Khon Kaen Educational Service Area Office 1, which comprises 46 schools, as a case-based study. The Smart Library system was designed and developed to bring essential Web 2.0 competencies to an open-source software platform built for digital knowledge sharing, collaboration, and publishing. As for the Smart Library system, overall results of the teacher's satisfaction evaluation indicated that the teachers' satisfaction was high on the whole. According to the results of system validation tests, the platform is a reasonable alternative to the key challenges encountered in managing and distributing teacher's digital knowledge within the primary school's network.