Feedback on SS TOER June 2015 Workshops

With the growing demands in education, the role of the teachers and students has also changed paramount. The integration of ICT in education has proven to foster not only professional development of the teachers but also their personal enrichment alongside significantly increasing the students’ learning outcomes. Thus, technological knowledge besides the content knowledge has become quintessential to the teaching profession. Consequently, the education department is keen on building these skills in the teachers. It has been a great learning opportunity to intern with IT for Change, engaging in teacher training workshop for the professional development of teachers by imparting technological education to enable them to create digital content and be proficient in integrating ICT in their everyday classroom instruction.

The teacher training workshop was conducted for the Social Studies teachers of Telangana state in 3 spells of 5 days each. It was an enriching experience to work with these teachers which gave me an opportunity to learn about the new open source tools like FreeMind, Stellarium, GIMP, Libre Office applications and an exposure to working on the Ubuntu OS interface. The learning about these technological tools and training the teachers on the same helped me get a better understanding and gain hands on experience by troubleshooting the issues faced by the teachers.

The ITfC team has been supportive and encouraging throughout the workshop. These subject matter teachers have been enthusiastic in learning about the new tools and were able to integrate in the template; however, there has been a gap in understanding the requirements in the initial stages which was addressed during the course of workshop. The teachers’ expectations from the workshop seem to be met and their presentations showed that the workshop was successful in bringing about the desired outcomes. The workshop had been administered and organized well. The everyday training coupled with the practice sessions fostered the learning and integration of ICT positively.

However, the language barrier for easier communication was a major issue, so translation may be provided to accomplish the outcomes effectively in less time. Another issue was the teachers had no personal laptops which challenged their retention as there was no practice during the spell breaks. Also, it was evident that a typical classroom scenario was reproduced even in the workshop where only the tech-savvy teachers could create the digital content up to the expectations leaving behind the others. The pace at which the classroom training was delivered could not meet the expectations of such teachers. However, I believe that working closely with the other teachers would surely help them comfortably learn to create digital content, so this is a matter of time, exposure and practice.

Overall, it was a great learning and enriching experience working with an organization like ITfC which helped me gain deeper insights into understanding the technology intervention in education and how open source applications can be used to create digital content.

- Rekha Kendalya