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 ICTs 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 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 extend that they can facilitate the classroom process while working with digital natives and non-natives.

ICTs in education as Public Resources

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 (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 ICTs 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.

Integration of ICT in education

ICT In school education

There are three ways in which ICTs can be introduced in schools– ICT Literacy, instruction in ICT-related subjects and use of ICTs to as a resource tool to teach various subjects as a regular part classroom teaching-learning-assessment process. Primary ICT literacy requires the acquiring of sufficient working knowledge and proficiencies that are needed to work in an ICT enabled system. This proficiency refers to competencies of navigating an existing ICT ecosystem without changing or modifying the system.

ICT In teacher education

There are three components to use of ICT for teacher education - Digital literacy - It is essential for student-teachers to learn to use ICT tools like radio, audio-cassettes, audio-video (AV) tools, computers etc. as well as methods such as information access, review, classification, communication and net-working. ICTs to create and share digital resources. Teachers and teacher educators can use ICTs to develop networks for peer learning and sharing. Thirdly, digital tools can be used to access, create and revise educational resources. Open Distance learning is also being changed by integrating ICTs, to allow for greater interactions between the educators and learners and amongst the learners.

ICT In education administration

ICTs can be used for planning and implementing training programmes through Training Management Systems.