Consultative workshop - Telangana ICT Text book organised at State Institute of Educational Technology (SIET), Hyderabad

New Delhi, September 20, 2016: Integrating Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in teacher education (TE) is a priority for Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA). CEMCA organized a consultative meeting held in RIE Mysuru, for South Indian SCERTs, for collaboration on programs on ICT in Education, specifically OER creation. Pursuant to this meeting, the Telangana School Education Department (SED) signed an MOU with CEMCA to support the creation of textbook and handbook, for its ICT@Schools program. SED organized a “consultative workshop” on 16^th and 17^th September 2016, to approve the framework, scope and approach for ICT textbook and develop an approach for OER creation and publishing. IT for Change, the implementation partner of CEMCA for this project, facilitated the workshop.

Prof. Upender Reddy from Telangana Department of Education welcomed the participants and shared SED expectations from the workshop. Mr. Gurumurthy from IT for Change introduced participants to the aims, agenda and expected outcomes from the consultative workshop. Ms. Ranjani from IT for Change presented the ICT text book design and approach. Telangana will have 2 student text books, one for classes 6-8 and second for classes 9-10. The deliverable for the current project is the first text book.

Ms. Ranjani and Mr. Gurumurthy demonstrated the free and open source educational software applications – Geogebra, Phet, Marble, KAnagram etc., to the core group which would be part of the text book, to help the participants get an understanding of the pedagogical possibilities.

On Sep 17^th Mr. Gurumurthy presented the TPACK framework and explained that the focus of the ICT text book must be to integrate technological, pedagogical and content knowledge of the teachers and learners. Since free sharing is a vital pedagogical principle, the program must use free and open source software resources and the content created should also be released as open educational resources. The core group agreed that the text book should encourage the constructing of knowledge by students which goes beyond textual knowledge and it should help teachers to test conceptual understanding.

Mr. Gurumurthy presented the KOER (Karnataka Open Educational Resources) website which is implemented using Mediawiki free and open source software. Mediawiki has been developed to support collaborative resource creation and publishing and is well suited for TOER (Telangana Open Educational Resources) as well. The ICT text book e-book / digital version will be made available on the TOER platform. The TOER platform will contain the resources created and shared by the teachers. 

Ms. Ranjani facilitated the sharing of the ‘project ideas’ that the core group members had prepared, for each subject (mathematics, science, social science, Telugu and English). A list of possible projects was prepared. The plan is to start with simple projects that one subject teacher can comfortably handle then go to complex projects which many teachers need to handle. She also presented the project ‘template’ to the core group.

The last session was on action items and way forward. A core group / steering committee was formed, consisting of the workshop participants, which will oversee the teacher training and OER creation including the ICT textbook. ITfC will prepare the first draft of the student text book and teacher hand book, on the basis of the overall plan, framework, approach and the proposed syllabus of the ICT student textbook and teacher/teacher educator handbook, endorsed by the core group. A five-day workshop will be held on October 17-21 to review and finalise the text book contents. A second workshop is scheduled for October 24 – 26 for learning Mediawiki to use TOER as the OER platform for Telangana.