A Professional Learning Community Approach for Teacher Development and OER creation - A toolkit/Building Professional Learning Communities

While success of ICT implementation will depend on many inter-related factors (provision of ICT infrastructure, basic infrastructure, teacher preparation and curriculum), perhaps the most important of all is teacher preparation. Without the required teacher preparation, providing infrastructure or specifying ICT integration through the syllabus would not be effective. However, the weakest component of ICT implementation in school education, has been the inadequate and sometimes irrelevant preparation of teachers to understand the use of ICT for their own professional development and for use in teaching. One problem with past teacher training has been a predominant focus on teaching the use of few popular proprietary software applications. Instead, the program needs to focus on understanding the nature of the ICT (digital literacy1), use of subject teaching related software tools, accessing web resources, encouraging teachers to create digital resources using a wide variety of (free and open source) authoring tools etc. Secondly, as world becomes more complex, teacher education needs to prepare the teacher and the learner to be capable of adapting to new environments and tackle new challenge. Being able to develop one’s capabilities is much more important than content knowledge, and the focus of ICT integration for TPD should focus on capability development and not merely on sharing or supplying digital content. A universal program of teacher education on these aspects would empower teachers to become comfortable and competent in using ICT for their own development, creation of digital resources and in subject teaching. It is necessary to envisage this training as a part of the regular in-service teacher education program and not as a stand-alone effort. All state governments prepare their teacher education plans for the next academic year, with budgetary support from the state government along with that of the central government through the SSA and RMSA programs. Based on the TPCK framework, digital literacy would be subsumed as part of the content (subject) and pedagogy related teacher education planned for the teachers.