This week, I want to bring up the issue of Training and Use of ICT
Whatever you think you know about ICT in education, throw it out the window. Chances are, if you are a career teacher, you are probably not trained properly in it. Now am I saying all teachers are not trained? Of course not! In my line, I have met plenty of well-trained teachers in using ICT for their lessons but there are many more who are not.
Today I am going to give you my reasons why. Some may agree and there will be those who will not. But I too will give you my solution for the educator who wants to improve him or herself in using ICT in their classes.
Generally speaking, teachers in all countries would go for teacher training, such as a centralized academy or through a course during tertiary studies. During training, trainee teachers would be drilled in their field of teaching, academics, classroom management, etc…
Now, modern day teachers are expected to use some form of ICT in their lessons. So during training, they may be using some ICT themselves, such as Laptops, Projectors, SMART Boards as well. And during training they may be taught on some approaches to using ICT in their lessons or examples done by others before them, but that’s pretty much it. Very little follow-up on training or updating themselves on new methods and approaches to using ICT in the classroom.
I remembering spending a good amount of time, sitting down with teachers, guiding them with their lesson plans on how to implement an ICT lesson, and I realized how lacking they are in terms of knowledge of what can be done and what shouldn’t be done.
Let me give you a general (Not Exhaustive) overview of what your lesson plan needs if you want to incorporate an ICT element into the lesson:
1) What are your lesson objectives and goals
2) How many periods are you willing to spend in this ICT exercise
3) Is this a Individual or Collaborative exercise
4) What medium are you going to use to conduct this exercise
5) How are the students going to be evaluated
6) And How are they going to submit their work
Many teachers also tend to not rehearse what they intend to do. So when they bring their class to the computer lab, for example, and things go wrong, they get lost and lose heart in the lesson. It is always good for a teacher to rehearse the lesson out to know what are potential problems, wouldn’t it be effective, will there be classroom management, etc.
Lastly and my most important point. Teachers MUST READ OFTEN.
This is a common issue in any industry. Teachers must read and be updated themselves on the latest innovations and techniques in Teaching and Learning with IT. But the fact is that many don’t. I did a yearly teacher’s survey in the school I was working at and almost 80% of respondents all said it is the responsibility of the school to update them on new ICT developments.
So unless you constantly update yourself, try it out yourself and refine your technique, then you will never be really trained.
So the challenge for this week? Make it a habit to update yourself, try it out and improve yourself.
Good websites to begin with are:
- http://www.teachthought.com/
- http://www.edudemic.com/
- http://nextvista.org/resources/
- http://ed.ted.com/
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