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ICT In Education

Information and communication technology (ICT) is a diverse set of technological tools and resources used to communicate and to create, disseminate, store and manage information. ICT has become part of everyday life and all sectors from banking to tourism now depend heavily on ICT for carrying out their transactions. The National curriculum framework 2005 (NCF 2005) has highlighted the importance of ICT in school education.

ICT in schools

Why do we need ICT in schools? Was education not happening before computers came into existence? Why is this paradigm shift necessary? The shift is necessary because this is the age of information and technology, an age that requires that teachers facilitate the gathering of this information and not merely teach.

Unfortunately, in India, ICT is largely associated with the use of computer and Internet. What one uses ICT for and how one uses it, is not addressed sufficiently. Schools and colleges acquire computers, Internet connection, LCD projectors and then send their teachers for crash courses that supposedly teach them to use technology. The trouble is this whole approach is devoid of focus. But, until teachers are made to realize the need of ICT, no amount of computerization can help.

What is ICT supposed to be used for in the class?             

A question I often hear teachers who are unwilling to take the ICT plunge is, ‘Can the student learn anything without the teacher explaining or intervening? And my answer to that is, ‘Students also have ideas of their own and knowledge that they gathered from daily life; this knowledge and ideas are not accepted or utilized by teachers. Using ICT this can be achieved in a big way.’

Training a teacher in using ICT is more crucial than acquiring a large number of computers. Teachers have to be trained to facilitate the learning process, make the process real, achievable, challenging, yet exciting and not intimidating. Reducing teacher talk and encouraging student discussion is extremely important. Everything need not be written on the blackboard to be considered as taught. Many teachers think the computer is used only to make the content look attractive! They need to know that in 21^st century, information is not difficult access, instead organizing, sharing, and collaborating become essential skills. Hence, ICT is not merely to portray information but to interact, share, and thus learn. ICT provides meaningful, absorbing media that makes teaching-learning more productive.

There are two main areas that we have to look at if a paradigm shift in the teaching process has to occur: the teacher’s role of teaching and the teacher’s role of helping the student learn.

 In the first one the teacher has to enhance teaching. Here, the teacher can ask himself or herself, ‘How will ICT enhance my teaching?’ The teacher should be aware of what lacunae exist in his/her teaching. The teacher should ask ‘Do I need to be empowered? ‘What more can be done?’ ‘What is the most effective way of teaching?’ ‘How will more students benefit from my teaching?’ ‘Will ICT help me?’

The second role of the teacher:  helping the student learn.

The Internet is full of information, textbooks are bursting with information. But this information can become true knowledge only when the teacher makes it meaningful. Here the teacher can use multimedia to make topics more comprehensible.

Think of a teacher showing large number of different flowers while reading out a poem on flowers, or teaching about the parts of a flower. Talking about the freedom struggle is one thing and seeing a 2 minute video on the same topic is altogether different. Preaching about rain water harvesting and showing a clipping while teaching is different. Showing how bunding is done, how crude oil is refined, gives students the correct idea. Instead of boring the students with a decade old chart on the respiratory system, showing a 1.5 minute video during teaching takes the students to a different level of understanding. Listening to the voice of Rabindranath Tagore while reading his stories, poems will help the students associate with the author. The entire teaching-learning process gets a boost with the appropriate use of ICT. It should be used to fill in the inadequacies that the teacher is facing. The problem of large numbers, students not showing interest can be tackled to some extent. Can use of ICT make teaching more meaningful, get rid of rote memorizing?

The teacher needs to be fully aware of the fact that students can find information, they need proper instructions, they need scope for creativity, expectations of the teacher brings forth performance.

 The present generation is a multimedia generation. It is not their fault. They are numbed by too much of information and easy access to that information. How then can we expect our students to sit and listen to lifeless sermons in class. The information that is given in the classroom is redundant and presented in boring manner. NGC, Discovery, Fox History can take one to places and time in minutes. They show so much of the present and the past far and wide that one seems to learn unknowingly. One search on Google and lo and behold! The information at your fingertips will be difficult to assimilate. How does one harness this gargantuan accessibility of information? How to make students use it appropriately and avoid brazen plagiarism? Vague expectations, lack of innovation, poor scope for creativity make learning dull. Mere use of computer or Internet doesn’t improve the learning output.

 The process should be like this.

Step one: What are the problems in schools, classrooms, exclusively related to teaching-learning? Identify them. Large numbers? Lack of interest? Many drop outs? Learning disability?

Step two: What is being done about these problems? Can use of ICT help? Try making lectures, classes more technology laden to bring a difference. Observe the difference in the classes.

 Step three: What are the requirements of the teacher to do a better job? Do the teachers feel that use of ICT to help them improve their teaching?

Step four: Are the teachers and students equipped with ICT skills?

Although ICT offers the opportunity to construct powerful learning experiences, it is pedagogically neutral. That is, ICT can be used in support of traditional teaching methodologies like the large group lecture, student note taking, and examinations. Teachers can use a computer and projector to show slides to illustrate a lecture, students can use laptops to take notes during

the lecture, and multiple choice quizzes about the content of the lecture can be put on a website. How these new ICT tools and resources will be used is a human decision, not inherent in the technologies themselves.

ICT has the potential to be used as a supportive educational tool enabling students’ learning by doing. ICT can make it possible for teachers to engage students in self-paced, self-directed problem-based or constructivist learning experiences; and also test student learning in new, interactive, and engaging ways that may better assess their understanding of the content.

A second way to assess the merit of ICT use in education is to consider what

its use enables students and teachers to do that they would not otherwise be able to do.

To explore this question, we consider five aspects of the educational use of ICT –

·         supporting new pedagogical methods

·         accessing remote resources

·         enabling collaboration

·         extending educational programs and

·         developing skills for the workplace

Modern constructivist educational theory emphasizes critical thinking, problem solving, “authentic” learning experiences, social negotiation of knowledge, and collaboration pedagogical methods that change the role of the teacher from disseminator of information to learning facilitator, helping students as they actively engage with information and materials to construct their own understandings.

WOMEN'S EDUCATION

WOMEN'S EDUCATION  is ironic that although Indians have deified knowledge as the goddess Sarasvatī, Indian women have been relegated to educational subservience throughout India's long history. Education means power, which in India remains largely in male hands. The earliest British educational surveys in Madras presidency in 1822 brought to official attention the relative absence of girls in formal schools. In 1881 the Hunter Educational Commission noted that a mere .2 percent of the women in British India were literate, although as in all early colonial surveys, investigators focused solely on school enrollment and failed to count the girls taught informally at home. On the eve of independence in 1947, literacy rates for both genders were abysmally low at 6 percent (female) and 22.6 percent (male). Since then, they have plodded forward slowly but surely, and there has been a noticeable improvement since the 1980s. Thus, in 1961 the literacy rates were 15.3 percent (female) and 40.4 percent (male); in 1981 they rose to 28.5 percent (female) and 53.5 percent (male); and in 2001 they had risen to 54.3 percent (female) and 76 percent (male). However, women's education still shuffles far behind that of men, with the disparities greater in a state like Bihar, where rates are 33.6 percent (female) and 60.3 percent (male), than in Kerala, where they are 87.9 percent (female) and 94.2 percent (male). The last century's goal for women was to educate better mothers and wives for the nation. However, some of the urban literate classes have begun to acknowledge that women are a national resource that India cannot squander away in this competitive era of globalization and computer technology.

Education in Early India

For much of Indian history, education involved the oral and written transmission of sacred texts, and the acquisition of survival and craft skills. Among some adivasis (aboriginals) like the Birhor of Jharkhand, for example, there was greater gender parity in learning the skill of tool making. However, Sanskritization and Westernization as "civilizing" agents have today marginalized women's vestigial rights among many tribal communities, which have been integrated into the mainstream society and economy. Artifacts from the literate Indus Civilization (6000–1650 b.c.) include icons of goddesses and the female genitalia (yōni), while some seals suggest that there may have been priestesses in an arboreal religion. The inhabitants clearly revered the female in nature, a vision of divinity that persists across India today. However, male power was also venerated, and no evidence exists of a matrilineal society. The absence of gendered spaces in the houses and public buildings do indicate that women had freedom of movement, but we have no information yet as to how and where education took place.

From this point, due to geopolitical reasons leading to patriarchal ascendency, the Vedas became the exclusive preserve of male Brahman caste priests, and women's learning became subsidiary to that of men. However, women were permitted to know the "remembered" secondary scriptures (smriti), including the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa epics, and later texts like the Dharma Shāstras (law books) and Purāṇas (Ancient tales), the latter containing myths about Hindu deities. Boys were taught in open air classes around a tree, or on the open verandas (pyāls) of buildings. Meanwhile, higher caste girls often sat away from the public eye, in rooms adjacent to the pyals, where they studied the smriti and nonreligious subjects like arithmetic.

Thus, around 525 b.c., we hear of learned women such as Queen Mahāgotāmi, the Buddha's foster mother, who struggled to establish the first order of nuns. Learned female ascetics like Mitta and Patacāra composed the Thērigātha, a revered hymnal section of the Buddhist Pali canon. Jainism's followers also revere an early female tirthankara(fjord crosser) or teacher, and Jainism encouraged women ascetics. However, over time, misogyny crept into texts, which scorned female sexuality and downgraded women's intellect. South Indian Dravidian society appears to have respected accomplished women during the Tamil Sangam era (200 b.c.–a.d. 500). Sangam poetry was composed by some 470 poets, including 154 women sages like Auvaiyār. Moreover, despite male dominance, women's power is seen in three of the five Tamil epics, which revolve around learned women.

By the first century a.d., as society absorbed new immigrants across racial lines, Brahmans reinforced gender and caste hierarchies in texts like the Mānava Dharmashāstras (Laws of Manu). This work praised women's domestic duties and denounced their sexual proclivities. Artisan groups transmitted craft skills, and both working and elite castes transmitted their oral traditions across generations. However, the lowest castes were excluded from literacy, while women's education became largely informal and haphazard. After the sixth century, in the medieval climate of invasions, wars, and feudalism, elite women retreated further into the domestic arena, instructed informally at home until the nineteenth century.

Medieval Women's Education

Despite such patriarchal norms and prejudice, there were still scores of women poet-saints and writers in the medieval centuries. Thus, Āndāl, Kāraikkal Ammaiyār, Akkamahādēvi, Gangāsati, Lallā, and Mīra have left a legacy of devotional (bhakti) compositions in the regional languages. Moreover, one class of educated South Indian women attended schools in public with boys. They were the lower caste temple dancers (dēvadāsis) who were rarely Brahman women. Dēvadāsis were ritually married to the shrine's deity in South India during the first millennium a.d., and they were the repositories of Indian traditions of dance and music. By the seventeenth century, however, many became court dancers and courtesans outside the norms of female domesticity. Governor Munro's survey of schools in South India in 1822 revealed that, except for the dēvadāsis, no other girls studied on the pyals in the company of boys.

The prophet Muhammad's wife and daughter were literate and powerful, but despite this and the Islamic belief in salvation through the written Qurʾan, Muslim women's educational lot in India was not substantially different. Islam was introduced into the subcontinent by patriarchal groups who kept their women in domestic seclusion within female quarters (zenānā). If women ventured outside, they wore a veil (purdah). Those women who defied the purdah were prevented from rising to power. Thus, Sultana Raziya (thirteenth century a.d.), the sole Muslim queen in India, was deposed quickly by men. Aristocratic women were often instructed by female teachers (ustād bis) in the zenānā, and some have left records, like the Mughal princess Gulbadan (sixteenth century), who wrote an elegant royal biography in Persian. Like Hindu dēvadāsis, Muslim courtesans (tawaif ) were taught to read and write. The tawaif Mahlaqa Bai Chanda (eighteenth century) wrote lyrical Urdu songs. Ordinary Muslim boys and girls studied the Qurʾan at mosque schools (madrassas), but often this consisted of rote chanting of the sacred verses. In this era, conservative Muslim and Hindu patriarchs often feared that a literate girl would write love letters and become promiscuous.

In North India, Muslim and Hindu women wore the restrictive purdah. In South India, elite Muslim women wore purdah, while Hindu women lived in domestic seclusion but enjoyed greater freedom of movement. As an important deterrent to female attendance in formal schools, purdahbecame the subject of discussion among elite women reformers in the twentieth century. The other major obstacle to girls' education was the custom of early marriage among Hindus and Muslims. Muslim women reformers were divided on purdah and the extent to which it should be practiced. Shareefa Hamid Ali and Dr. Rahamatunnissa Begum felt that it injured girls' health and prevented their attendance in schools. Nazar Sajjad Hyder initially argued that parents would more readily send their veiled daughters to school, but she later opposed purdah. In 1914 the Begum of Bhopal convened a Muslim Women's Educational Conference in Allahabad, and philanthropists began schools for girls, raising the female literacy rate.

Colonial Era

European conquest led to the political decline of Indian states, and indigenous schools decayed. Catholic missionaries began schools to teach Christianity in Goa and elsewhere from the sixteenth century, while Protestant evangelicals founded schools in southern, eastern, and western India beginning in the eighteenth century, notable for their attempt to bring girls to school without caste distinctions. The early colonial state's interest in education was cursory, but it supported missionary endeavors, and British officials gauged educational competence through literacy and school enrollment. Henceforth, oral and informal learning became less significant. When the British Parliament gave the East India Company a large grant in 1813 to promote education in India, evangelicals arrived in droves to proselytize in schools. Women missionaries assiduously began elementary classes for girls, who learned English through the Bible and converted to Christianity. Indian rulers like the Rānis Lakshmibai and Parvatibai of Travancore gave financial support to missionaries for their educational work. In 1849 the government subsidized a Calcutta (Kolkata) girls' school, founded by J. E. D. Bethune, Ram Gopal Ghosh, and Jaikissen Mookherjee. In 1854 Charles Wood's Despatch on Education launched a new policy of granting aid to private schools. Promptly, Gopal Kistnah Pillai asked for a grant for his girls' school in Madras (Chennai). However, the first major breakthrough for girls' secular and high school education occurred in 1877. Mary Carpenter, the eminent educator, advised the government to establish secular teacher training centers in the presidency capitals of Calcutta, Bombay (Mumbai), and Madras. She used the guidelines of a similar school started in Madras by the Maharaja of Vijayanagaram.

Child marriages were a major impediment to girls' education. Among the higher Hindu castes, girls were married before puberty, until which time they might attend municipal or mission schools. After their nuptials, at the age of eleven or twelve, girls no longer attended public classes; if lucky, they were taught at home. Until the 1930 Sarda Act raised the age of marriage for girls to fourteen years, female literacy did not substantially improve. Christian converts educated their daughters, however, so their literacy rates were higher. This goaded Hindu reformers, whose daughters had not studied at mission schools, and they sent their daughters to schools with a secular curriculum. In 1904 Annie Besant wrote The Education of Indian Girls, which laid the curricular foundation for girls' schools. Reform organizations like the Prārthanā Samāj, Ārya Samāj, Rāmakrishnā Society, and the Theosophical Society started schools that taught Indian culture as well as Western subjects like geography and hygiene.

Indian nationalists worked to legalize compulsory education and to increase government funding for schools. The paucity of women teachers and doctors led to the establishment of teachers' training institutes and colleges such as the Lady Hardinge Medical College for Women in Delhi in 1916 and Queen Mary's College in Madras in 1914. Besant also worked to start a Women's University at Adyar in 1916, while women reformers started occupational training institutions for working-class women.

Independence Era

Since 1947 the Indian government has tried to provide incentives for girls' school attendance through programs for midday meals, free books, and uniforms. This welfare thrust raised primary enrollment between 1951 and 1981. In 1986 the National Policy on Education decided to restructure education in tune with the social framework of each state, and with larger national goals. It emphasized that education was necessary for democracy, and central to the improvement of women's condition. The new policy aimed at social change through revised texts, curricula, increased funding for schools, expansion in the numbers of schools, and policy improvements. Emphasis was placed on expanding girls' occupational centers and primary education; secondary and higher education; and rural and urban institutions. The report tried to connect problems like low school attendance with poverty, and the dependence on girls for housework and sibling day care. The National Literacy Mission also worked through female tutors in villages. Although the minimum marriage age is now eighteen for girls, many continue to be married much earlier. Therefore, at the secondary level, female dropout rates are high.

Indian women's education has, however, certainly improved since independence. Many urban women are highly educated in the sciences, medicine, computer technology, and the social sciences. India now has missions of female doctors, nurses, teachers, and social workers. Yet, in most important fields, girl students are outnumbered, and women professionals do not often receive equal pay, even though Indian women scientists, for example, are among the world's most talented. Such gender disparities in education will continue until girls are valued as highly as boys; until patriarchy and sexual predation are reduced; and until female feticide and infanticide, reflected in the sex disproportion of India's population, disappear.