ICT teacher handbook/ICT in teaching learning

As a teacher, technology allows you to integrate technology in many different ways -for accessing resources, for connecting with each other and for creating resources. We saw how you can organize your own learning through a Personal Digital Library (PDL) and create resources in multiple formats. In this section, we will see how technology can also be integrated in your teaching learning practices to design learning environments for your students.

The first step in determining the integration of technology is to do a curriculum analysis to determine methods of transacting:

1. what do I need to teach
2. what do I need to know and
3. how do I teach it. 

This could help in determining the resources needed for teaching-learning; we have already seen in the earlier section some methods of resource creation and accessing. While accessing resources is certainly important, developing a framework for evaluating the resources is very essential.

The usefulness of a resource can be based on:

1. suitability of a resource to the concepts to be covered
2. areas of learning reinforced
3. extensions of learning provided and
4. suitability to a given classroom context (age appropriateness, content level)

Such an evaluation requires the teacher to be familiar with technology besides being well versed in content and pedagogy. This has been theorized as the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge approach to teacher professional development. A teacher can no longer ignore the technology aspect in her practice.

The multiple possibilities of creating using ICT have also given rise to a universe of educational software applications that can bring about new methods of looking at content and teaching.There are many free and open source software applications developed to explore different subjects. These applications can be used to create resources for teaching, for classroom transaction and for assessment. Many of these applications are part of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux custom distribution and hence available in your school. In this book we will cover following applications

1. Kanagram (for vocabulary building with English)
2. Geogebra (for Mathematics resource creation, teaching and assessment)
3. Marble (for Geography resource creation, teaching and assessment)
4. K Geography (for Geography resource creation, teaching and assessment)