Activities

Plans for 2014-15

CEMCA and IT for Change (ITfC) had partnered in a project for enabling teacher educators to integrate ICTs into their professional development and develop a self-supporting and sustainable 'Communities of Practice (COP); the COP is a cutting edge teacher professional development model that uses ICTs in different ways to sustain networking and sharing.

During 2014-15, DSERT has implemented curriculum revision for the DEd. Programme, as a part of which, there is a paper on 'ICT Mediation in teaching-learning', as an important part of teacher studies. With the support of CEMCA and IT for Change, DSERT is training DIET faculty to transact this paper in the revised DEd course from 2014-15. This is an opportunity to introduce blended learning approaches, by combining face to face workshops with virtual interactions and support the integration of ICTs in teacher education. This will also enable teacher educators to participate in the COP.

A core team of select DIET faculty were trained in two workshops of 5 days duration each. Master Resource Persons, 3 each in Mathematics, Science, Social Science (Geography) and Language (English/Kannada) from each of the four divisions of Karnataka were trained. Participants were trained to use COP platform for teacher educators as a forum for continuous professional development of teacher-educators.

IT for Change has been working with teacher educators from CTEs (Colleges of Teacher Education) and DIETs in Karnataka over the last few years to integrate Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for their professional development. Two Workshops were organised with support from CEMCA for these faculty members from the Bangalore and Mysore divisions from 21-25 October at Bangalore Rural DIET and for those from Belgaum division 1 from 11-15 November at Dharwad DIET, towards bulding 'Communities of Practice” (CoP) amongst teacher educators2. The SCERTs in the other South Indian states were also invited to participate, and Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh deputed SCERT and DIET faculty for these workshops.

The workshops focused on the use of ICTs for teacher educator professional development, ranging from building basic ICT skills to participating in the COP platform for teacher educators, including access to web resources and networking through mailing groups. Educational tools such as Geogebra, Audacity, PhET, Marble, KGeography, Kalzium, and Freemind, video creating tool Record My Desktop, image editing tool GIMP were covered. Participants also learnt and practised use of web tools such as search, maps, translate, books, videos on Youtube, digital albums etc. Participants also browsed the KOER wiki portal maintained by the teachers COPs, made teams, each of which choose a topic to build 'personal digital resource libraries' by gathering digital resources in text, image, video formats from the Internet, and adding their own annotations/ comments. The participants realised that digital processes are much more dynamic and hence there would not be a 'final' resource, since these would forever undergo revision and enrichment, this is the spirit of OER (whose '4 Rs are Reuse, Revise, Remix and Re-distribute).

In both workshops, the participants were very enthusiastic and enjoyed becoming more familiar with the digital world. The participants from Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh shared that the rich use of free and open source tools was an important learning for them and that CoP was a powerful and democratic teacher development model. Both states would like to introduce similar CoP programmes for teachers and teacher educators The participants plan to be in touch and seek and provide support through the CoP . Many were also motivated to buy personal computers, get internet access and continue their journey of life long learning. Participants were highly appreciative of the efforts of DSERT, CEMCA and IT for Change, in helping them organise into a community of practice.

A workshop was organised by CEMCA for the DIET faculty of Himachal Pradesh at Dharmshala in April 2015. IT for Change took a session on KOER and COP over video-conference. IT for Change has been working with the Karnataka education system to build a COP for teachers and teacher educators. The COP has been collaborating to create a OER - for, by and of the teachers,  called Karnataka Open Educational Resources (KOER). The session began with participants watching a video of the STF-KOER programme and subsequently Guru came on video-conference to discuss with participants about the COP and KOER. The methodology of this session itself reinforced the value of digital methods of learning - through video and video-conferencing.