Resource Review Workshop - Telangana ICT Text book and Hand book organised at Centre for International Programs (OUCIP), Osmania University
New Delhi, October 22, 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 a MoU with CEMCA to support the creation of ICT student textbook and teacher / teacher educator handbook, for its ICT@Schools program.
In line with this MoU, SED approved the framework, scope and approach for ICT textbook in its “Consultative Workshop” on 16th and 17th September. IT for Change, the implementation partner of CEMCA, for this project, facilitated the workshop. 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.
During October 17-21, SED organised a workshop for the development and review of the resources connected to the ICT student textbook and teacher/teacher educator handbook, at the Osmania University Centre for International Programs (OUCIP).
Prof. Yugandhar Reddy, SED, welcomed the participants and shared SED expectations from the workshop. Mr. Gurumurthy Kasinathan, from IT for Change, introduced participants to the aims, agenda and expected outcomes from the workshop. Dr. Manas Ranjan Panigrahi, Programme Officer CEMCA gave a brief background of the work of CEMCA and COL in promoting ICT in teacher education as well as OER. He explained the significance of OER in education.
Subsequently, Ms. Ranjani, from IT for Change, presented the ICT text book and hand book resources which was made available on the OER wiki on the Teacher Network website. The participants in the workshop, who were specialists in curriculum design and development in different disciplines provided inputs and resource ideas as well as contributed activities and resources to the lessons in the text book and the hand book. They formed four sub groups, each looking at one part of the text book/hand book. The four sub-groups were led by Mr. Vinayak, Mr. Ramesh, Mr. Rajender, Mr. Venkat Reddy, each took charge of one of the four parts of the text book and hand book (What is the nature of ICT, Data representation and processing, Communication with graphics and Audio visual communication). Each sub group had teachers and teacher educators as members.
Dr. Angel Rathnabai, from CIET NCERT, participated in the workshop on the second and third days and shared her perspectives and expertise on the NCERT ICT curriculum, on which the text book and hand book are based. Prof Radha, Director SIET, also participated in the workshop to ideate on OER development possibilities for SIET. Since SIET is the institution mandated with the creation of digital resources, their role will be vital in taking OER adoption in Telangana forward. One session with the SIET team focused on the new possibilities of creating interactive digital resources, using a combination of educational applications, animations and video.
On October 21st Prof Rajaram Sharma, Joint Director CIET, NCERT participated in the workshop, to review the work done in the workshop. The four sub groups presented the text book and hand book approach and activities to him. He shared many ideas and approaches to refine the text book and the hand book, and also how these could be meaningfully implemented in the schools. This expert review was extremely useful for both SED participants and IT for Change team.
Mr. Gurumurthy presented the TOER (Telangana 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, on which the ICT text book e-book was made available, by the CEMCA and ITfC team.
The last session was on action items and way forward. The core group formed, consisting of the workshop participants, agreed to virtually collaborate with the ITfC team to add, revise and refine the resources which are part of the ICT textbook and hand book. The text book and hand book shall be finalized by the next workshop, which is scheduled in November.
