Brainstorming Workshop on ICT Integrated Teacher Education for SCERTs of South India at Regional Institute of Education (NCERT), Mysuru, Karnataka
New Delhi, April 25, 2016: Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), New Delhi organised a Brainstorming Workshop on ICT Integrated Teacher Education for SCERTs of South India at Regional Institute of Education (NCERT), Mysuru on 22nd April 2016. Integrating Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in teacher education (TE) is a priority for CEMCA. During the three year plan (2012-16), CEMCA, in collaboration with Karnataka SCERT and DIETs had worked to build the ‘Teacher Educator – Communities of Practice” (TE-COP). During the 6 year plan of CEMCA (2015-21), it is planned to extend the TE-COP to the other states in South India, as a part of integrating ICT into TE, to support quality teacher education and school education. Twenty (05Female and 15Male) participants from SCERTs of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telengana, Andhra Pradesh, Teacher Educators of RIE-Mysore, and IT for Change Team attended the Brainstorming Workshop.
Prof. M U Paily, RIE, Mysore welcomed the participants from the SCERTs of the four South India states - Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Telengana. Dr. Manas Ranjan Panigrahi, Programme Officer, CEMCA made a presentation, introducing CEMCA and providing an overview of the Workshop. CEMCA is keen to support ICT integration in TE in the South Indian states and would like to explore how the work is being done in Karnataka in this area, in collaboration with IT for Change, could be extended to the other states. Prof. M U Paily made a presentation on the evaluation of Teacher Education Initiative of CEMCA for Three Year Plan (TYP) 2012-15, which was conducted by him. The key learnings from the evaluation are that teacher educators are interested to learn ICT and ICT integration for supporting TE. However they need greater hand holding and support and there is a need to integrate the learning with the work of their institution. There is enormous potential in using the wealth of free software and open content to improve the working of teacher educators and their institutions, he emphasized.
Sri. Gurumurthy Kasinathan, IT for Change, Bengaluru discussed on possible strategies for ICT integration for TE, in the South Indian states. He suggested that the creation of COP for teacher educators, with a focus on teacher support and OER creation would help TE. Establishing a model DIET with regard to ICT integration, using ICT for work planning and monitoring, developing the ICT text book for school education and classroom integration, and establishing Subject Teacher Forums (professional learning communities), creating OER in state languages were his suggestions for SCERTs.
This was followed by presentations from the representatives of each of the four SCERTs, on the key challenges that their DIETs / TEIs are facing. They spoke about what has been attempted in their states, what is currently being implemented and also what they planned to do. The discussions of four SCERTs are documented in a mindmap.
In the final session, the SCERT representatives, CEMCA, RIE and ITfC team discussed the development of a plan of Action for integration of ICT in Teacher Education and the development of the South India COP. The plan was in two parts – for the next year (immediate short term plan) and the next 3-5 years (medium term perspective plan). The discussions of four SCERTs are documented in a mindmap. The common focus areas of the four SCERTs include the creation of Communities of Practice amongst school teachers (along the lines of the Subject Teacher Forums) and the development of OER in their state languages. They also emphasized the creation of ICT infrastructure and in-house capacity development for maintenance and development of hard infrastructure, content as well as teacher capacities in ICT integration. The workshop closed with the key priorities for the next year being highlighted by Gurumurthy, Prof M.U.Paily and Prof. Upender Reddy, Telangana.
