RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

Teach­ers must em­brace In­for­ma­tion, Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and Tech­nol­o­gy (ICT) train­ing if they are to prop­er­ly mould pupils for the fu­ture.

So said act­ing Chief Ed­u­ca­tion Of­fi­cer John Roopchan as he ad­dressed teach­ers dur­ing an ICT Pro­fes­sion­al De­vel­op­ment pro­gramme held at Na­pari­ma Col­lege in San Fer­nan­do.

Roopchan ad­mit­ted that more need­ed to be done to fos­ter an ICT cul­ture in all schools. He said even though ICT has been ben­e­fi­cial, there has been a neg­a­tive im­pact to the ed­u­ca­tors, es­pe­cial­ly those who seem un­will­ing to em­brace the tech­no­log­i­cal changes.

“Some chal­lenges in­clude stu­dents ac­cess­ing il­le­gal web­sites; stu­dents cut­ting and past­ing rather than gen­er­at­ing their own work; stu­dents choos­ing on­line com­mu­ni­ca­tion rather than re­al life con­ver­sa­tions,” Roopchan said.

He said while teach­ers are be­ing trained to use ICT to com­plete tasks with more ef­fi­cien­cy, this type of teach­ing was not cur­rent­ly as wide­spread as the Min­istry want­ed it to be.

“The use of ICT is very im­por­tant to en­cour­age in­de­pen­dent and ac­tive learn­ing and self-re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for learn­ing,” Roopchan said. “It en­ables self-paced learn­ing, pro­vides ac­cess to a wider range of up to date learn­ing ma­te­ri­als, en­rich­es learn­ing through a com­bi­na­tion of au­dio, video, im­ages, text and an­i­ma­tion,” he added.

How­ev­er, Roopchan said pos­si­ble neg­a­tive im­pact must nev­er be out­looked.

Through the ICT pro­gramme, Roopchan said, teach­ers, are learn­ing to utilise smart so­lu­tions for the fu­ture in­clud­ing lap­top learn­ing, e-learn­ing, smart class­rooms, di­dac­tic equip­ment and stim­u­la­tions.

He said through the min­istry’s 5-Star ICT plan, a struc­ture has been de­vel­oped to co­or­di­nate ICT ini­tia­tives as well as retro­fitting schools to ac­com­mo­date tech­nol­o­gy. He said there will al­so be a cur­ricu­lum re­vi­sion and up­grad­ed con­nec­tiv­i­ty in schools.

Roopchan al­so said 13,000 lap­tops were pro­vid­ed to all sec­ondary schools last year.