ITfC worked with Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyaan (RMSA), Department of State Educational Research and Training (DSERT), Karnataka, to create professional learning communities of Mathematics, Science and Social Sciences teachers, through the Subject Teacher Forum program (STF) across 34 districts of Karnataka. The program was based on the extensive and intensive use of public digital resources to build and support teachers networks as well as to to create a resource rich learning environment in these subjects.
ITfC acted as the resource institution of the program, participating in program design, conducting teacher education workshops, supported the district trainings and provided academic and technological support to teachers through the virtual forums. Over 5 years (2011-16), ITfC had directly worked with around 1,500 teachers, and indirectly with another 18,500 teachers to enrol them into the professional learning communities. Over these years, teachers have exchanged ideas, experiences and resources and shared feedback in over 150,000 emails on the mailing lists. Many of these resources created/revised by teachers have been published on the Karnataka Open Educational Resources repository.
The STF is an example of a scalable and sustainable program for teacher professional development in the public education system.
ITfC has produced a short film on our work in the 'Subject Teachers Forum', for UNESCO. The film discusses our approach to integrating ICTs into teacher education, focusing on building professional learning communities, to create digital learning resources and network with one another for sharing and learning. It is based on interviews with two directors of education in Karnataka government - M.N. Baig and Rama Rao, Prof Padma Sarangapani and two government high school teachers who are state resource persons for the Subject Teacher Forum program. The aim of this film is to explain to policy makers that ICT can be a powerful TE method and for meeting RTE goal on education quality, such use of ICTs is essential.
A 6 minute excerpt of the film is available here.