ICT in School Education and its Implications for Teachers

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has entered almost every part of our lives: retrieval and sharing of information, storing data, business purposes, travel, entertainment, sale and purchase of materials, so on. In the last few years, education sector has also realised that ICT has the potential to be the foundation of a modern society and is essential for youth of the nation to match steps with the developing world. In the following document, I have explored the existing policy regarding ICT in School Education in India and its implications for teachers. I have also made some suggestions so that teachers can effectively use ICT-enabled teaching-learning environment.

Role of ICT in Education

Whenever a reform or a new method of education is introduced, one of the most important goals is to increase learners’ outcome, in other words, student achievement. ICT on the other hand is aimed mainly at making education accessible to all. Regardless of the social, economic and cultural contexts, ICT is believed to reach out to a large number of students, who were earlier unable to access education. This inaccessibility could be due to a number of reasons: they live in rural and remote-rural locations, are differently-abled which restricts them from going to school, have left schools for personal reasons or do not find the existing education system interesting.

ICT provides an engaging learning environment by means of multimedia devices such as computers, television, radio, dvd players, etc. Students and teachers both get the advantage of using different sources of information which may not be available in the textbook or other material used by them. Not only can they retrieve information, but also exchange it with people all over the world. Technologies like video-conferencing and distance learning bridge the gap between teachers and students across geographical regions. ICT encourages active participation by the students and gives them the liberty to create knowledge and learn on their own with little intervention by the teacher. Collaborative activities involving both teacher and students helps in reducing the hierarchy usually present in classrooms.

History of ICT in Education in India

• With the launch of SITE (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment) in 1975–76, ICT was introduced in education. The main objective was to educate the rural population about issues like family planning, agriculture, etc., but one of the aims was also to make education accessible to teachers and students in the villages of India through satellite.
• Indian National Satellite (INSAT) launched in 1980 initiated the setting up of a Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET) and State Institutes of Educational Technology (SIETs) in 1984-85.
• CIET is the central organisation responsible for utilising television and radio for educational purposes. It also conducts training and research to improve the quality of education at school level.
• SIETs in Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and Maharashtra are the branches of CIET and are responsible for the planning, research, production and evaluation of educational softwares like video, audio programmes and computer multimedia (Policy draft, 2008).
• During 1984-85 the Computer Literacy And Studies in Schools (CLASS) Project was introduced which was later closed down during 2000s.
• The National Policy on Education 1986 which was modified in 1992 also emphasised the use of educational technology in school education.
• National Task Force on Information Technology and Software Development set up in 1998 made recommendations to provide computer systems to all educational Institutions up to Higher Secondary/Secondary Schools.
• Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan Framework (2011) also directs the BRCs to provide ICT kits to schools.
• The Digital Library projects help in preserving literature and other artefacts from all over the country by digitising them. This is made available on public platforms so that anyone across the globe can access them for educational purpose.
• EDUSAT (2004) was the first Indian satellite built to serve educational sector. It has helped in enhancing the satellite based distance education system in India.
• The National Curriculum Framework 2005 has also pointed out that integration of ICT with core curricular subjects is essential for students to succeed in the advanced age.

While reading about the initiatives, I realised that most of them ‘provided’ the content of education instead of encouraging the construction of content by teachers and learners. The National Policy on Information and Communication Technology in School Education (Revised in 2012) addresses this issue to some extent. Let us look at some of the plus points and some of the problems with regard to the role of teacher in ICT-enabled classrooms in this policy:

1. The vision of the policy states that it aims at preparing youth for all-round development of nation. The omission of the role of teacher in preparing the students and thus the need of preparing the teachers first cannot go unnoticed.
2. The policy goal indicates that the focus of the policy is on students’ achievements and the expected outcome of efficient workforce. This again ignores that teachers have a significant part in shaping the lives of students and therefore they are also a part of the community which should utilise ICT and contribute to nation-building.
3. One of the challenges faced by the education system in India is accessibility and ICT is seen as a solution to this problem. While it is true that ICT has greater reach, this is not the only function it can be used for. Along with student education, it can be efficiently used for teacher training which will consequently reduce the problem of accessibility since even a few number of trained teachers can take up the responsibility of teaching a large number of students.
4. The section on ICT Literacy and Competence Enhancement describes how ICT will be implemented in school and what comes out is that even though both teacher and students are expected to go through a 3-level training, finally it is the student who has to appear for exam in ICT and prove his/her competence. This point undermines the importance of the competence required by the teachers as well.
5. At the implementation level, the focus is more on ICT literacy which is separate from ICT-enabled learning, i.e., integrating ICT with curricular subjects. This is problematic since teachers will not be interested in taking training for an extra subject apart from the ones they teach.
6. A glance at the levels of training brings to one’s notice that instead of ICT, the curriculum mainly relates to computer education. This is strengthened by the fact that a ‘dedicated’ teacher will be employed to teach this subject. This in itself defeats the purpose of integrating ICT with other subjects as teachers will think of it as a separate subject with separate teacher.
7. The policy describes ICT-enabled teaching-learning as comprising of various tools, techniques, content for effective education. Resources are made available to teachers instead of giving them the opportunity to develop the resources. Thus, ICT becomes a tool for centralising the education process and does not allow teachers to innovate the methods of teaching as per their requirements.
8. The policy promotes creation of localised digital resources by teachers and students. This is important for the upgradation of digital repository which needs literature from all over the country in different languages. This step will also encourage development of resources by teachers in collaboration with other teachers, review each others’ work and improve their own work.
9. ICT will also be used for capacity building of teachers. This means that they will be trained in ICT to enable them to integrate it with other subjects. But a study of teacher education institutes in Kerala found that ICT curriculum addresses only computer related knowledge and there is no connection between ICT and other subjects (Swamy, 2012). This is the situation throughout the country. Thus a strict implementation of ICT is required in the teacher education institutes too and not just in schools.
10. The policy advocates use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for digital resource creation and sharing. This is a positive shift from the policy’s earlier draft which proposed outsourcing of software to private parties. Software under public ownership gives the users liberty to access, modify and share resources on the public domain. The content is not controlled by any private authority thus widening the range of areas teachers and students can explore.

Some suggestions to address these issues:

First it is essential to identify one of the most significant problems in the context of ICT in School Education: ICT is seen as an alternative to teachers in classrooms. I agree that there is scarcity of ‘quality’ teachers but the solution for this problem is not depending on ICT but to put more efforts in teacher capacity building. This policy also emphasises teacher education but through ICT. While ICT can be used in variety of ways like introducing them to different classroom settings, techniques for teaching, educational materials, etc., ICT cannot replace humans. So, there is need for teacher educators (for example, students of M.A.Education) to be competent in the use of ICT as a tool for integrating teaching subjects like philosophy, sociology, etc., with the school subjects like maths, english, science, etc. This is essential because often the teachers cannot deal with the real classroom setting where each child’s personality is different and has different needs.

Proficiency in use of technology itself is not enough for teachers to develop useful educational resources. They should be engaged in the current educational debates and make their views heard so that policy makers and educationists take into consideration the experiences and problems faced by teachers in the school classrooms. For this, online platforms connecting teachers all over the country to each other and to educationists should be provided by organisations like NCERT and SCERTs. Schools should arrange for regular workshops and seminars for teachers during the school working days (such workshops during vacations are the reason teachers are not interested in any such training) to update them with the recent trends in education sector.

The National Focus Group on Teacher Education for Curriculum Renewal brings out a very significant use of ICT in teacher education. Not only they can develop projects and problems for engaging students in critical thinking through ICT, they can also get exposure to various socio-cultural classroom settings by means of other teachers who will share their stories on public platform. This will ensure that teachers are getting trained continuously both in theory as well as practice. I also believe that the recommendation made by the group about increasing the duration of Teacher education programme to 5 years is worth considering. In this programme, ICT should be utilised from the beginning for teaching and teaching the students how to use ICT in school classrooms. To conclude, ICT should be seen as a tool for effective education mediated through teachers and not as a substitute for teachers in classrooms.

References

1. Department of School Education and Literacy. (2011). Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan Framework for Implementation. Ministry of Human Resource and Development, Government of India.
2. Department of School Education and Literacy. (2012). National Policy on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) In School Education. Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. Retrieved from http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/ mhrd/files/revised_policy%20document%20ofICT.pdf
3. National Council of Educational Research and Training. (n.d.). Position Paper National Focus Group on Teacher Education for Curriculum Renewal. New Delhi: NCERT. Retrieved from http://www.ncert.nic.in/new_ncert/ncert/rightside/links/pdf/focus_group/ teacher_edu_final.pdf
4. Swamy, R.N. (2012). Towards Improving the Quality of Education by Integrating ICT in Teacher Education. Retrieved from http://www.csi-india.org/c/document_library/get_file? uuid=c5061f9c-ae7c-4447-8570-bef3edb2eaf4&groupId=10157