Workshop on “Communities of Practice for Teacher Educators” for DIETs in Bangalore, Karnataka, October 21-25,2013

New Delhi; 20/10/2013: 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 21-25 October 2013 at the Banaglore Rural DIET.  In 2012-13, with the support of CEMCA, IT for Change organised two workshops for the 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.

The workshop is a follow-up to the previous training received by the teacher educators and the participants will learn more about Open Educational Resources (OER).  They will learn 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 resources will pertain to topics covered in the text books pertaining to classes VI and IX as well as components of school leadership and management. Apart from tapping the digital learning resources available, participants will also continue their practise of ICTs for connecting to one another for continuous peer learning and support as well as for networking to build communities of learning. The community of teacher educators will continue to interact through emails and through the wiki platform. The basic need / priority to provide resource support to teachers in classes VI and IX support them in transaction and assessment 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.