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 endeavor 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 to
The toolkit has been developed by IT for Change, an organization working with teachers and school systems on the use of FOSS for OER creation. The development of this course material was supported by the as part of the Grant.
This toolkit is aimed at
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, Teachers' toolkit for creating and re-purposing OER using FOSS is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0. By using the content of this publication, the users accept to be bound by the terms of use of the Commonwealth of Learning’s Open Access repository (http://oasis.col.org).
The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to promote the development and sharing of open learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies.
Images: All images used in this toolkit, unless otherwise specified have been created by the author. Most of these are screen shots of the FOSS applications discussed in the toolkit.
Disclaimer: The ideas and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author; they are not necessarily those of Commonwealth of Learning and do not commit the organization.
Caveat: This course material was published to support the learning of students. Neither IT for Change nor the Commonwealth of Learning grants any degree, certification or credits based solely on your completion of this course material.
Acknowledgement: The development of this course material was supported by the Commonwealth of Learning, Burnaby, Canada as part of the Grant #2015-2585 generously made by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, USA.
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 editors, subject experts and technology experts from IT for Change.
Authors – Gurumurthy Kasinathan, Director and Sriranjani Ranganathan, Deputy Director
Content support - Rakesh B., Technology Associate and Venkatesh T.Gowda, Program Associate
Technical support - Yogesh K.S., Technology Associate
Formatting support - Harish - Technology Assistant and Sunil C., Program Assistant
Graphics - Smriti Khera, Research and Communications Assistant
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The Teachers' toolkit for creating and re-purposing OER using FOSS tools is licensed under CC BY 4.0 license