ITfC has been working with teacher-educators from District Institute of Education and Training (DIETs) and Colleges of Teacher Education (CTEs) in Karnataka, over 2012-2016, to build a 'community of practice' for teacher educators. This 'Community of Practice for teacher-educators' (COP TE) is being build in collaboration with Directorate of School Educational, Research and Training (DSERT) with support from Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA). Through capacity building workshops, ITfC has helped teacher educators to integrate ICTs for their professional development as well as supporting teacher education.
During 2012-13 and 2013-14, the training focused on basic ICT Literacy and building of personal digital libraries, including 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).
During 2014-15, the COP-TE program focused on building the capacities of the DIET faculty to transact the 'ICT Mediation in teaching-learning' paper, as a part of teacher studies component of the revised DEd. Programme of DSERT. ITfC has written the teacher hand-book and also the student source book for this paper. The aim is to help teacher-educators, who work in 'pre-service teacher-education' to participate in the COP.
During 2015-16 to strengthen the COP, ITfC designed and conducted a workshop for DIET principals to help them understand ICT integration in their work for better planning and monitoring the programmes of district level. The aim was that training heads of DIETs would support the integration of ICTs in the work of the institution. Very rarely do DIET Principals receive any training and many of them have little exposure to computers and Internet. Making them comfortable in using and understanding ICTs hence becomes critical to support the COP model of individual and institutional learning in the area of teacher education. Once aware of the benefits of ICT in supporting self-learning and peer-learning, Principals would participate in the COP-TE and also encourage their team to participate for building richer and shared understanding on their practice.
The workshop also had sessions on the NCFTE document, to understand and reflect upon its vision and recommendations for teacher professional development. The workshop resource materials are available here.
COP-TE in other states
Apart from working on the COP-TE in Karnataka, ITfC also participated in similar programs in other states, in collaboration with CEMCA.
ITfC participated as a resource institution in a one day brainstorming workshop for directors of SCERT's from South India, at Regional Institute of Education (NCERT), Mysuru.
ITfC participated in the "ICT integrated Teacher Education workshop at Department of Education, Allahabad University in March 2014, and covered the topic “Importance of Community of Practice for Teacher Educators", both from concept as well as as practice aspects, over video-conference. The course had 30 participants from select DIETs across Uttar Pradesh, who were quite excited to learn about public educational applications ranging from subject tools such as Geogebra or Marble, to collaboration tools like Mediawiki.
In April 2013, ITfC participated in a workshop organised by Distance Education Project of SSA (DEP-SSA) at IGNOU, Delhi for teacher educators (DIET faculty) from Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Uttarakhand.