Workshop on “Communities of Practice for Teacher Educators” for DIETs and CTEs in Dharwad, Karnataka, November 11-15, 2013

New Delhi; 11/11/2013: With the support of the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), New Delhi, IT for Change  is organizing a five day workshop for the teacher educators from CTE (Colleges of Teacher Education) and DIETs in Karnataka from 11-15 November 2013 at the Dharwad DIET. This is the second workshop in the year 2013-14.

In 2012-13, with the support of CEMCA, IT for Change organised two workshops for teacher educators of Karnataka in collaboration with the DSERT, Karnataka. These workshop focused on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for professional development, building basic computer literacy skills, introduction to the use of subject-based educational tools and working on the COP platform for teacher educators and its features including access to resources, participation in mailing groups and discussion forums. Educational tools such as Geogebra, Audacity, PhET and Record My Desktop were also demonstrated.

In October, 2013, IT for Change  organised a follow-up workshop for these participants to further their learning on Open Educational Resources (OER) and about accessing resources available on-line as OER and practise the OER principles of re-use, revise, re-mix and redistribute on the Karnataka Open Educational Resources (KOER) platform.

The November Dharwad workshop seeks to extend the community of practitioners by training the next set of CTE and DIET faculty members on learning about ICTs, focusing on the use of ICTs for both constructing (learning resources) as well as connecting (for building a community of practitioners). The participants will also learn the use of free and open educational applications including Freemind, understand educational tools such as Geogebra and Marble, web-based tools including on-line maps, digital albums and translation tools, and tap digital learning resources available on the Internet. The community of teacher educators will continue to interact through emails and through the wiki platform. The basic need to provide resource support to teachers is expected to provide a strong rationale for this community of teacher educators to grow.

CEMCA has been a key player in promoting the awareness about OER and its relevance and benefits to Indian teacher educators. CEMCA also sees 'Communities of Learning' as a cutting-edge model for connecting teacher educators to one another for peer support and mentoring.