TE year1handbook/Year1 Unit1 Shift in perspective from existing curriculum

This is a new course and has not been offered by the D.El.Ed. programme prior to the syllabus revision.

Building digital skills in today's context of an increasingly information-based society has been acknowledged as an important focus area for education. The role of technology mediation in teacher education and school education have been underscored in several curriculum documents as well. The National ICT curriculum for school education is a response to this emergent need and has articulated a curriculum that builds in students and teachers, the skills of computing, creating, learning and collaborating using safe, ethical and legal means of ICT. The ICT Mediation Paper has been drafted to be in line with the focus areas of the National ICT curriculum.

This course makes an important shift from the way traditionally ICT courses in Education have been taught, hitherto in Karnataka and other states. Traditionally ICT have been taught as a set of skills to work with a set of applications. These skills have also often been introduced in a stand alone manner without much reference to how these skills map to the underlying educational processes. This approach also assumes a tool-centric and very instrumentalist view of technology.

This paper takes a different view to ICT Mediation in Education from the starting point of how the different possibilities allowed by technology can support educational processes of creating, collaborating and teaching learning. ICT can alter learning spaces and methods and allow self learning and peer learning. Digital methods can allow new methods of creating and representing content and provide new pedagogies, extending Pedagogical Content Knowledge into Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge. Digital literacy and a critical perspective on technology are important domains of learning in and of themselves. Thus, teachers need to have a critical understanding of the role being played by ICT in education and larger social processes, as well as develop digital skills in integrating ICT into their professional development and teaching-learning processes. Hence the course is being offered as a part of teacher studies.

The paper assumes an integrated approach and it is anticipated that the generic resource creation skills developed by the student teachers will be used in other subject areas. On-line forums, personal digital libraries and creation of multimedia documents are skills that the student teachers can bring in their submission of assignments and portfolios in other courses as well. One of the ways of assessing the effectiveness of this course, is the extent to which student teachers use these digital methods in their learning of the other courses. This also requires the teacher educators of the other courses to become familiar with the processes and concepts of this course.

This course, therefore, has attempted to define ICT Mediation in terms of 4 units across two years, linked to core educational processes.

Year 1: Unit 1 - ICT for connecting and learning

Year 1: Unit 2 - ICT for generic resource creation

Year 2: Unit 1 - ICT for subject specific resource creation

Year 2: Unit 2 - ICT in teaching learning