Professional Development of Teacher Educators on ICT Integration in Education for Establishment of Community of Practice for Sharing Learning Resources and Teaching-learning Practice: An Evaluation

Abstract

Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia's (CEMCA) in its three years cycle of programmatic interventions under the sector of teacher education engaged in promoting adoption of blended approach to ICT integration in continuous professional development of teacher educators. In 2012-13, 2013-14 and 2014-15, CEMCA organised/supported several trainings on ICT integrated Teacher Education and contributed towards building of a Community of Practice (CoP) for teacher educators. Within this framework, CEMCA has developed an online Community of Practice (CoP) platform for Teacher Educators. The programme was for enabling teacher educators to integrate ICTs into their professional development and develop a self-supporting and sustainable Communities of Practice (CoP). ICT skill training is another component of the activity, and the assumption is that all those teacher educators trained will use the CoP regularly to help each other in a peer and collaborative learning mode to develop a “culture of sharing” best practices and experiences. After three year, the programme was evaluated using deferent data collection methods. The data for the evaluation was collected from various sources like teacher educators, master trainers, DSCERT, ITFC, principals of DIETS using focus group discussion, personal interview-face to face mode and telephonically, questionnaires, online survey using Google forms and meta-analysis of the existing reports by ITFC. The data collection also involved review of the resources provided, the outputs created, Media-Wiki based online Karnataka Open Educational Resources (KOER), and the Google mailing group’s postings. On this effect the evaluation study found significant findings viz. i) Various aspects of the training programme were appropriate and effective except the duration of the programme; ii) It was for the topics like Kgeography, Marble, wiki, and PhET only about fifty percent felt it very relevant to their work. Amongst all the topics it was for spread sheet, presentation, word processing, mailing groups, e-mail and Ubuntu platform the participants viewed highly relevant since about 80% of them rated this as 6 and above; iii) The training was effective in developing and improving ICT skills and competencies related to all the areas in which the participants were trained; iv) In all the case mailing group postings, mailing group replies and concept maps the contribution was good and it is sustained even now; v) About 60% of the participants reported that they have either conducted a formal training programme or acted as resource persons in various training programme; vi) Most of them were happy with the topics introduced and requested for additional training on wiki and KOER, Ubuntu, audio, video, and image editing, freemind, kalzium, geogebra, and PhET. There were request to include website development, e-learning, creation of subject videos, pedagogical sessions, mobile learning, other online teaching tools, exposure to assessment tools including rubrics, online forms, content management system, and Kannada language software. // Paper ID 302