Finalisation of Telangana ICT Text and Hand book, organized by Telangana Department of School Education, at IASE, Hyderabad from 21st- 25th Nov 2016
New Delhi, November 29, 2016: Integrating Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in teacher education (TE) is a priority for Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA). CEMCA and the Telangana Department of School Education (DSE) organized a “Finalisation workshop” from 21st to 25th November, at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Education, Osmania University, to finalize the ICT student textbook and teacher / teacher educator hand book. IT for Change, the implementation partner of CEMCA, for this project, facilitated the workshop. The specific objectives of the workshop were as follows:
· Review and finalize the student text book and teacher handbook and recommend the final versions for approval to the DSE
· Orient a core group of teachers, teacher educators and text book editors to lead the implementation of the new ICT syllabus in the state, including text book / hand book implementation
· Develop a training plan for teachers across Telangana, for the implementation of the ICT course
Prof. Upender Reddy, DSE welcomed the participants and shared expectations of DSE from the workshop. Mr Gurumurthy Kasinathan, Director, IT for Change, introduced participants to the aims, agenda and expected outcomes from the workshop. Ranjani from IT for Change presented the final version of ICT text book and teacher / teacher educator handbook, which had incorporated review comments received from the core group and Prof Rajaram Sharma, Joint Director CIET, during review workshop, held earlier.
Over the next three days of the workshop, the team from IT for Change presented the textbook and teacher / teacher educator handbook in small groups, and the core team and teachers reviewed separate sections of the textbook. Four sub groups were formed in the previous workshop; with 1-2 members from the core team and 2-4 teachers for reviewing different sections of the textbook and associated part of teacher handbook. These sub-groups reviewed and exchanged feedback which were collated for subsequent incorporation. The revised version of the textbook and handbook was updated on the Teacher Network web portal. Yogesh from IT for Change, provided the required technical inputs for the text book and hand book, which is being produced using the ‘wiki books’ feature of Mediawiki.
Ranjani presented the list of projects to be prepared, with inputs from the review workshop, for each subject, namely, mathematics, science, social science, telugu and english. The core group reviewed the projects and also provided additional projects and activities for incorporating into the text book and hand book.
The workshop also had a session to discuss the metadata to be captured for all resources on the OER platform. An initial list based on NROER metadata was reviewed and discussed. This will be used by the DSE to prepare the metadata for all the digital resources already available with the department, including with SIET and SCERT. Subsequently this will be uploaded onto the OER platform of the DSE. DSE is quite keen on establishing the “Telangana Repository on Open Educational Resources” (TROER) state OER repository, on the lines of the National Repository on Open Educational Resources (NROER) of NCERT and has requested for support in this regard.
The last session was on action items and way forward. The core group, consisting of the workshop participants, will oversee the translation of the ICT student textbook and teacher / teacher educator handbook into Telugu, as soon as the finalised versions are shared by IT for Change. Subsequently, teacher training workshops are planned at the district level to orient mathematics and science teachers in schools all over the state on the text book and hand book, to enable them to teach the same in their schools.
