Workshop on ICT integrated Teacher Education organised by ITfC with support from DSERT and CEMCA, Dharwad, 11-15 June 2013
New Delhi: 17/06/2013: CEMCA supported the workshop on ICT integrated Teacher Education focussing on 'Communities of Practice for Teacher Educators' held at the Dharwad DIET (District Institute of Education and Training), Karnataka from 11 15 June, 2013 for CTE (College of Teacher Education) and DIET faculty from the Belgaum divisions. In her inaugural address, the Coordinator of the e-Vidya Academy (Formerly Microsoft IT Academy), Smt Shankaramma Dhawalgi, who is also the 'Education Technology' wing faculty member at the Dharwad DIET emphasized the need for all DIET and CTE faculty members to become comfortable in using ICTs for their professional development and for supporting teachers as well. She stated that this journey is a long one, since there is much to learn. Use of IT makes leanrign engaging and enjoyable. The Dharwad DIET and the e-Vidya Academy had provided training on ICT integration into education for hundreds of teachers and teacher educators over the last few two years, which had helped the participants to become more proficient, she informed.
Gurumurthy K, Director IT for Change (ITfC) discussed the recent revisions to curriculum and how the new curricula made higher demands of teachers in terms of a constructivist approach to transaction and Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) approach to assessment. Teachers require a resource rich environment to be able to prepare them and meet diverse learner contexts and needs and therefore, they need to learn how to tap the digital learning resources available as well as use ICTs for connecting to one another for continuous peer learning and support. He also mentioned the 12th Plan guidelines of Govt of India for Teacher Education that provides a lot of scope for all teacher education institutions to integrate ICTs for individual and institutional development. While informing the context of the workshop, he informed the role played by the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA) and the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) in promoting quality teacher education.
Over a period of five days the CTE and DIET faculty members covered various web tools; free educational software tools and components of basic computer literacy. They were introduced to the CoP platform for teacher educators and its features including access to resources, mailing groups etc. Educational tools such as Geogebra, Audacity, PhET and Record My Desktop were demonstrated. Some of the advanced learners also practised using these tools for learning and for resource creation. Participants practised accessing the Internet for information and their own learning as well as to connect and communicate with each other. The participants incorporated various digital resources as video links, images and mind maps (Free Mind) in their lessons. Resources created by faculty were reviewed through peer discussions and through the email group. Participants were introduced to Wiki and the ideas of collaborative resource creation and they also accessed the Karnataka Open Educational Resources (KOER).
This community of faculty will continue to interact through emails and through the platform to create materials for in-service and pre-service teacher education. CEMCA will continue to engage with the ITfC and DSERT, Karnataka to organise similar training for more teacher educators to improve participation in the CoP, and develop a culture of sharing amongst teachers and teacher educators.
