56,000 high school teachers in Kerala to get IT training

A total of 56,000 high school teachers in Kerala will soon get specific training in Information Technology as part of the state government's general education rejuvenation mission'.

The training is imparted under the IT@School, a government initiative to impart IT education in schools, from May 8 onwards.

The IT@School has come up with the teachers' training project after the launch of the 'High Tech School' project, envisaged to digitise 45,000 classrooms in state-run schools.

The highlight of the training would be the practical sessions which focus on the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in classroom transactions, said K Anvar Sadath, executive director, IT@School Project.
 

The three-day training programme focuses on specific activities which help in classroom transactions of teachers such as preparing multi-media presentations, collecting digital contents such as text, pictures and videos from internet, how to make use of such contents to develop content and language computing.

Unlike the routine ICT-based training, this initiative for teachers is planned to provide subject-wise ICT training this year, he said.

"Subject experts and ICT experts would jointly provide the training to teachers. All subjects including languages are included in the training programme," Sadath said.

The three-day training would be implemented by utilising over 1,100 trainers in 550 centres.

ICT learning and training are completely based on free software platform.

The training introduces specific activities to design learning process by self and also to formulate contents in the appropriate manner, he said.

It would be conducted using training modules and e-contents which are specifically developed for each subject.

Arrangements would be made to provide ICT training based on screen reading software exclusively for visually-challenged teachers, he said.

A dedicated team would be assigned to monitor the progress and review the training programme.

A total of 38,000 upper primary teachers had already been provided specific ICT training which started from April 8 in four batches, the official added.