Workshops on “ICT Integrated Teacher Education and Communities of Practice for Teacher Educators” for DIETs and CTEs of Karnataka
Workshops on “ICT Integrated Teacher Education and Communities of Practice for Teacher Educators” for DIETs and CTEs of Karnataka
New Delhi; 11/02/2015: Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), New Delhi in collaboration with IT for Change (ITfC), Bengaluru organised two workshops for the teacher educators from CTE (Colleges of Teacher Education) and District Institute of Education and Training (DIETs) in Karnataka. These were in line with the CEMCA’s earlier engagements in Karnataka on building a strong Communities of Practice (CoP) for ICT integrated teacher education and intended to: build and strengthen teacher educators’ capacities to integrate ICTs into teacher-education, focusing on their professional development; and leveraging the CoP platform to create an environment of collaboration; and assist teacher educators to develop and use digital libraries/OERs through a critical perspectives on technology and its use in education.
The 1st workshop was organised for teacher educators of Mathematics and Science subjects from January 20-24, 2015 at the Rural DIET, Bangaluru and the 2nd workshop was organised for teacher educators of Social Sciences and Languages subjects from February 3-7, 2015 at the Rural DIET, Bangalore. IT for Change has been serving as an implementing partner for CEMCA to liaise with the Department of State Educational Research and Training (DSERT), Karnataka and organise the training programmes.
In his inaugural address, Sri C.R. Rangadhamappa, Senior Assistant Director DSERT (Department of State Education Research and Training) spoke about the revisions to the D.Ed. curriculum and syllabus and how the new curricula required ICT integration into the teaching of core subjects. He also mentioned that usually social science and language teachers and teacher educators tend to be less exposed to ICTs and requested the teacher educators to fully participate in the workshop and become confident in integrating ICTs in their work so that, as 'Master Resource Persons' (MRPs) they could effectively train their peer DIET faculty in divisional cascade workshops.
Over a period of five days the 22 DIET faculty members were provided training on 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 Marble, Kgeography, Freemind and Record My Desktop were demonstrated. Teachers were also introduced to Karnataka Open Educational Resources (KOER) Wiki portal and the idea of collaborative resource creation. They also discussed the historical evolution of ICTs and the socio-cultural, political and economic implication of digital ICTs. Building the community of educators around a core content of teacher education will provide the context for continued interactions, through emails and through the wiki platform. They discussed the “ICT Mediation in teaching learning” paper and the design and conduct of the divisional workshops. The expansion of the training to cover 700 teacher education institutions across the state is expected to support the growth of the CoP.
While there was a noticeable difference between the second workshop participants (DIET faculty for Kannada and Social Science subjects) from the first workshop ( DIET faculty for Mathematics and Science subjects), in that, the former were much less exposed to ICTs, they more than made up in their interest in learning.
