The Blueprint and Toolkit for School-Based Teacher Development for secondary teachers has been produced in an initial generic version. All the activities included in the Toolkit have been tried out by thousands of teachers in countries across the world. Every activity has been revised in the light of that experience.
The purpose of the Toolkit is to provide a detailed framework that can be adapted to the context of a particular country, region, district or school. The capacity to version resources is one of the major advantages of the concept of open educational resources (OER).

Versioning, as will be explained more fully in Section 5, can take place at a variety of levels. For example, at a fairly simple level, you can change the names of teachers mentioned in the text to names common to the country in which you live. This may seem a minor point, but experience has shown that making the resources as authentic as possible is significant in gaining the support and respect of teachers. At a more complex level, it is possible to add links to local video clips, incorporate activities that focus on new local curriculum developments or explore changes in the knowledge base of the subject taught.

It is important to remember that the main purpose of the Blueprint and Toolkit is to develop school-based teacher development (SBTD). It is hoped that at the end of this initial programme principals and teachers will be more confident about taking charge of improving their professional development. The content of the Blueprint and Toolkit aims to give schools tasters of key areas of curriculum development. It also aims, to some extent, to explore the values associated with being a teacher in the contemporary world. All the topics could, and should, be followed up by more detailed programmes specific to certain topics or subjects.

Creating a version of the Toolkit for certain contexts is an important and interesting task. It gives you the opportunity to influence the ideas and practice of a large number of teachers in your country – no small responsibility!

The first task is to read the Blueprint and the Toolkit carefully. The versioning process is focused on the Toolkit, but the Blueprint as a whole will give you important contextual information.
Your second task is to familiarise yourself with the concept of OER. The next two sections, based on the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and UNESCO publication Guidelines for Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher Education, give you important background information relevant to the versioning task. If you are already familiar with this material, go forward to Section 4. Section 5 explains the practical and technical side of how to approach the versioning task.

Download the Versioning guide document below.