CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING OF ICT 2024-26

 Preparing teachers to use technology in a classroom is an important step for ICT enabled education in the country. This course will focus on moving beyond computer literacy and ICT- aided learning, to help student-teachers interpret and adapt ICTs in line with educational aims and principles. It will explore ICTs along three broad strands; teaching-learning, administrative and academic support systems, and broader implications for society. ICTs have often been seen as a stand-alone subject, consisting of a finite set of proprietary applications, taught to children directly by technology experts, bypassing teachers, which has diluted possibilities of teacher's ownership, enhancement of expertise and engagement. Seeing ICTs as an important curricular resource and an integral part of education, according primacy to the role of the teacher, ensuring public ownership of digital resources created and used in education, taking a critical perspective on ICTs as well as promoting constructivist approaches that privilege participation and co-creation over mere access, are principles that the course will help teachers explore. Applying these principles can support Teacher Professional Development models that are self-directed, need-based, decentralized, and collaborative and peer-learning based, and continuous, in line with the NCFTE, 2009 vision for teacher education Since ICTs are technologies, along with developing such understanding, the course will also help student-teachers to learn integrating technology tools for teaching learning, material development, developing collaborative networks for sharing and learning. This learning can help integrate pre- service and in-service teacher education, address traditional challenges of teacher isolation and need for adequate and appropriate learning resource materials The course will explore use of ICTs to simplify record keeping, information management in education administration. Communication and information sharing/ storing are basic social processes; new digital Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), by making these easier and cheaper, have significantly impacted and are impacting our socio-cultural, political and economic spheres. The course will help student-teachers to develop an understanding of the shift from an 'industrial society' to a 'postindustrial information society', where the production and consumption of information is easier/ simpler as well as important. This change has positive and negative implications and possibilities for democracy, equity and social justice, all core components of our educational aims. The course will help student-teachers reflect critically and act responsibly to prevent how ICTs are used to support centralization and proprietisation of larger knowledge structures; it will show student-teachers how ICTs can be adapted to support decentralized structures and processes, as well as build the 'digital public' to make education a participatory and emancipatory process