ICT teacher handbook/ICT in Education

Students must develop ICT competencies and skills through their school years, to fully participate in the knowledge society. If the students must develop ICT skills, it goes without saying that the teachers must be equipped to facilitate them to acquire these skills. The scope for ICT in Education has three broad strands – in the school and the teaching-learning process, in teacher-education and in strengthening the administrative and academic support structures.

Principles for ICT in education

Digital Natives

While considering ICT in Education, we need to consider that the generation of children entering schools are digital natives. They are born into an age where rapid changes are taking place in digital technologies, and learning to navigate the digital world is an essential skill. An important point to keep in mind here, however, is that these conditions of nativity are not uniform. Socio-economic disparities are mirrored in disparity of access to the digital world and many socio-economically deprived children are deprived of this aspect of education too. It is also important that teachers acquire and internalise technological and pedagogical skills to the extent that they can facilitate the classroom process while working with digital natives and non-natives.

ICT in Education as Public Resource

An important principle in public education, is that curricular resources and the tools for creating such resources need to be publicly owned, so that they are freely available to teacher educators, teachers and students without restrictions. In the same manner, digital tools and resources used in public education, should be publicly owned. Use of free and digital tools/resources can provide a rich and diverse public digital environment. Digital resources are non-rivalrous (meaning that sharing does not reduce availability) and hence promoting public creation and sharing of digital resources (both e-content and software) is an important step to ensure systemic benefit from ICT in education. The National Policy on ICT in school education therefore recommends the use of free and open source software applications. Use of proprietary products can create vendor 'lock-in' which could be detrimental to education.
A free and open source operating system such as GNU/Linux is widely used. This can save public funds on license fees on procuring proprietary software and upgrade fees at later dates. There are a large number of freely shareable educational tools on GNU/Linux, pertaining to mathematics, science, social sciences etc which can be used in schools. There are large number of additional freely shareable tools , such as IBUS which supports word processing in more than 50 languages, including most languages used in India or the ORCA screen reader necessary for the visually handicapped or Scribus for desktop publishing. All these tools can be pre-installed in a 'custom distribution' of GNU/Linux for a one-time installation. A custom distribution of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux system will be provided to all the schools for implementing the program. This software distribution will have all the software applications that are part of the text book and hand book. Since all applications are free and open source, they can be periodically upgraded without license fee implications. The department may provide an updated version of software distribution annually, so that the schools can upgrade their ICT Labs and use the latest versions of the different software applications.

Integration of ICT in Education

ICT in school education

There are three ways in which ICT can be introduced in schools– Digital literacy, instruction in ICT-related subjects such as desktop publishing or video editing, and use of ICT to as a tool to teach various subjects as a regular part classroom processes.

ICT in teacher education

There are three components to use of ICT for teacher education - Digital literacy, creating and sharing digital resources, and networking for peer learning and sharing.

Open Distance learning is also being changed by integrating ICT, to allow for greater interactions between the educators and learners and among the learners.

ICT in education administration

ICT can be used for planning and implementing training programmes through Training Management Systems. Information can also be easily shared within and across institutions to facilitate education administration, for instance circulars or orders can be shared over mail or phone based communities.

Open Educational Resources

The National Curriculum Framework 2005 speaks of contextual, inclusive and meaningful education. For these ideas to come true, relevant learning resources must be available for the students, teachers and teacher-educators. These resources must be contextual, easily available and allow for learners to modify and adapt for their requirements.

Currently, textbook may be the most important resource for many teachers. This resource is limited, made once in a year and perhaps represents one set of thoughts. The text based resource does not incorporate audio visual resources, and may not address multiple learning needs. External resources, though available, are also largely non-digital, expensive and cannot easily be adapted for local needs and contexts. For critical and diverse perspectives to develop, multiple resources must be made available and it must be possible for knowledge to be constructed and shared from multiple contexts. Otherwise, it is possible that only some forms of knowledge will remain important and other will die out. For knowledge sharing to freely happen, educational resources must become freely available, freely shareable and freely changeable to adapt to local contexts and needs. Open Educational Resources (OER), as they are called, are such learning resources. Open Educational Resources are digital resources that are available freely, in multiple formats - text, audio, video - to allow for multiple learner needs.

As per UNESCO, OER are "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions."
OER became a global phenomenon when Wikipedia was launched in 2001, this is an encyclopedia on the internet, where knowledge is created and shared by many people and not restricted to one person. Following this, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a leading university in the United States of America, released many of its course materials for free called Open Courseware (2001). In teacher education, educational resources were developed collaboratively by a programme for Teacher Education in Sub Saharan Africa and published on-line. In India, National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) and IGNOU have offered many of their courses as OER.

Principles of OER

Open Educational Resources are resources that allow the following four kinds of freedoms to learners/ users. These “Freedoms” are as follows:

1. Resources can be accessed for free and 're-used'
2. Resources can be revised to make it relevant or more useful
3. Resources can be re-mixed / combined to make a new resource
4. Resources can be redistributed - the revised/ remixed resource can be shared back.

These are called the 4 Rs (re-use, re-vise, re-mix and re-distribute) of OER

Licensing and copyright

OER are shared under copyright which are less restrictive than the usual 'all rights reserved' and allow for some or all of the four R's. One popular copyright used for such resources is the “Creative Commons”. Creative Commons is a type of copy right (sometimes called Copy Left, to contrast it with the traditional 'all rights reserved' copyright) that will allow you to use the resources, modify them, combine them and also redistribute. When you are sharing a learning resource as OER, you can share it under Creative Commons License, by explicitly mentioning the license 'Copyright – Creative Commons' in your text. If nothing is mentioned, the default copyright is 'all rights reserved', which will mean others cannot modify or share your resources. The ICT hand book and text book are released as OER, which allows teachers, teacher educators and others to re-use, as well as revise and re-distribute.

OER - a national priority

At the national level, the NCERT is maintaining the National Repository of Open Educational Resources. The Telangana Education department has established its own repository called the Telangana Repository of Open Educational Resources. It is organized on the principles of OER and is built on a MediaWiki platform like Wikipedia. A similar repository has also been built in Karnataka where teachers have collaborated through the Subject Teacher Forum program of RMSA and DSERT Karnataka to create and publish resources.