A Professional Learning Community Approach for Teacher Development and OER creation - A toolkit/Preface

The status of the teacher reflects the socio-cultural ethos of a society; it is said that no people can rise above the level of its teachers. The Government and the community should endeavour to create conditions which will help motivate and inspire teachers on constructive and creative lines. Teachers should have the freedom to innovate, to devise appropriate methods of communication and activities relevant to the needs and capabilities of and the concerns of the community. National Policy of Education, 1986.

Teacher education acknowledged as an important lever for the quality of school education. Improving the quality of teacher education would help in development of more capable and motivated teachers, which would improve the quality of classroom processes and school education.

In a society that is termed as the 'digital society', educational processes too can be meaningfully impacted by digital technologies (popularly known as Information and Communication Technologies, or simply ICTs). Perhaps the most important area of integration would be teacher education. A significant focus of ICT in education has been on students learning to use few software applications, without much involvement of the teachers, this has made these programs stand-alone. Integrating ICT into the academic and administrative processes of the school will require investing in integrating it for Teacher Professional Development (TPD). As the NPE 1986 says "

A recent development in the educational domain has been the rise of Open Educational Resources (OER), with the promise of delivering quality education. An essentially, digital phenomenon, OER seek to leverage the possibilities of digital methods for accessing, creating, modifying and sharing educational content. OER has redefined the copyright regime, stimulating the sharing of content with license to re-use, modify and share or publish.

There is need to promote the creation, revision, publishing and adoption of OER across the world. One way to do this, could be to make available more digital tools for people to use, to create, revise and publish OER. The “Hands-On Toolkit for Teachers to Create, Re-purpose and Publish Open Educational Resources (OER) using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)”, aims to promote the creation, re-purposing and publishing of OER using FOSS applications.

1 A tool-kit

The toolkit has been developed by IT for Change, an organization working with teachers and school systems on meaningful ICT integration, to support the aims of education. The development of this course material was carried out with the aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada, as a part of the Research on OER for Development ROER4D research program

This toolkit is aimed at senior education officials to help them understand the tool-kit components and processes, and plan for a similar program, adapting it to local context, needs and priorities. It is also for Teacher educators and Teachers, to support them to design and implement similar programs and participate in the design and implementation of same.

The toolkit is available in an on-line edition in the form of a “Wiki book”. The Wiki book edition can also be shared off-line on a DVD, which can enable user to read the digital version without internet connectivity. Along with the tool-kit, a custom software distribution which contains the FOSS desktop tools covered is shared on-line, which can be installed on your computer and enable learning the applications that are a part of the tool-kit.

The toolkit is released under the CC-BY license, and the custom software distribution is released under the General Public License (GPL). The CC BY license enables you to make copies of the tool-kit with or without modifications and distribute it for profit or without profit. The GPL license enables you to make copies of the software applications with or without modifications. Modifications if any, to the software, can be re-distributed only as FOSS.

2 Copyright

©2017 IT for Change. Except where otherwise noted, 'A Professional Learning Community Approach for Teacher Development and OER creation - A toolkit' is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.

Images and videos : All images and videos used in this toolkit, unless otherwise specified have been created by the author. Some of these are screen shots of the FOSS applications discussed in the toolkit, others are from workshops conducted by IT for Change with teachers from government schools in Karnataka and Telangana.

3 Author

IT for Change, Bengaluru

393, 17 Main, 35 Cross, Jaya nagar IV T Block, Bengaluru 560041. India

Phone – 91-80-26654134, Mail , Website

Acknowledgements

The toolkit was written by a team of researchers, editors, subject experts and technology experts from IT for Change.

Authors – Gurumurthy Kasinathan, Director and Sriranjani Ranganathan, Deputy Director

Technical support - Rakesh B., Technology Associate and Yogesh K.S., Technology Associate

Editing support and Graphics - Yatti Soni, Communications Associate

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'A Professional Learning Community Approach for Teacher Development and OER creation - A toolkit' is licensed under CC BY 4.0 license