Role Of ICT In The Professional Growth Of Teachers

Abstract

Sing, et al. (2011) highlights the four important role of ICT in designing and supporting collaborative learning activities. First is ICT enable many‐to‐many interactions concurrently, which is essential for collaborative learning for instances blogs, virtual social network, and video conferencing etc. help in creating the synchronized workspace where students can share their ideas or react to others ideas thereby       facilitating in breaking the dominance of initiation‐respond evaluation (IRE) classroom‐based discourse structure. Secondly, ICT also have referential capabilities which refer to the potential of externalizing the group thinking in the form of inscriptions for example online concept map, shared docs, etc. for further reflection and discussions. Thirdly, these digital inscriptions can be easily transferred, aggregated and modified within and across different ICT platforms thereby cutting across time and space and ensuring continuity among collaborators.  And last, ICT promotes different patterns of participation for instance on social networking site one can participate in different roles like adviser, inquisitor, critic and many more. ICT can be used for training teacher in many ways as structured by Collis and Jung (2003) teacher training can take many forms.  The framework has four extreme dimensions core technology, complementary technology, learning How to use ICT and learning via ICT. Teachers can be trained to learn HOW to use ICT or teachers can be trained VIA ICT.  ICT can be used as a core or a complementary means to the teacher training process.