IICD supported project: Teachers’ Professional Development Using ICT

Countries: Tanzania [TZ]
Sectors: education

Summary

ICT opens possibilities to renew established ideas and approaches on how to deliver teaching and how learning takes place. Life and personal exposure with new ways of learning enlarges the possibilities of teachers to improve on the existing teaching methods. It also enables them to retrieve other quality materials (e.g. from the Distance Learning and Education Services) and new information easily or compile their own teaching materials with ease. The project, therefore, aims at providing the knowledge and skills of using ICT in teaching to teachers already in the field. It does so through mounting short tailor made courses on developing competences and capacity building using ICT for teaching and learning.

Update

Updated: 2006-08-31

The project started its operations June 2003 by piloting Teachers training at Kisutu Secondary schools where 26 teachers were trained for three weeks. At the end of the course, the teachers requested for more training to be given to them. All the 26 teachers were given a copy of the “Jamani Guide”, a simple teach-yourself guide on computer skills developed by volunteers at ADEM with support from IICD. To date, the project has been improving its own training materials and working towards integrating ICT in the teaching of classroom lessons.

To keep abreast of the trends development in the area of ICT and education, the project owners have attended a number of workshops and seminars both ICT locally and internationally and have been establishing contacts and learning as much as possible. Arrangements are in place to start training the College tutors. This has taken time to realize but now from recent discussions with the director of Teacher Education in the Ministry of Education and Culture, it is all systems go!

Introduction

One of the main problems in Tanzania’s education today is the low quality of teaching; this is partly due to lack of materials, low level of education of the teachers themselves and a lack of incentives and enthusiasm. The traditional ‘Chalk and Talk’ method with no conducive atmosphere for students to work and learn by themselves needs to be change to be in line with the current worldwide trends.

There is need to introduce Group teaching, which will allow interaction among students; Planned and structured lessons with key points, by teachers; on screen presentations by teachers using ICT tools which will highlight relevant theories, pictures and functions; the possibility of providing additional information from the Internet.

Objectives

In order to develop and improve the level of education in Tanzania, it is very important to have qualified teachers. However, teachers must be working in a conducive environment; they need to be equipped with modern tools and skills. It is from this background, that the Teachers’ Professional development trains teachers on how to use ICT to improve Teaching and Learning process at schools including the Teachers’ Colleges. The main intention is to close the gap related to lack of teaching and reference materials, including textbooks at both Teachers’ Colleges and Schools.

More precisely the project objectives are: to make teachers from Teachers Colleges and Secondary Schools competent in the use of ICT as an integral tool that can be used to improve schools level of efficiency in its administration (for example, Excel spreadsheets geared at school management, Ms Word geared towards word processing, e-mail and internet geared towards communication and accessing information) and secondly to empower teachers to improve their teaching materials and methods.

Development Impacts

It is expected that the users of the project who are tutors in colleges of education will improve their teaching and learning abilities and skills through the use of the Internet and other ICT tools, which will help them to share knowledge and information, improve skills and exchange experiences with various other bodies of information globally.

Through the use of ICT, teacher presentations in the classes will be more interesting and therefore, easy to follow. They will also have broader knowledge on different subjects they teach through the knowledge sharing and exchange. Therefore, their capacity in teaching will automatically be enhanced; this will create a trickle-down effect to students, the other target group, who will achieve a qualitative education within reasonable time and costs. Furthermore, grandaunts from the colleges will be ICT literate as a result of ICT being introduced to them in their teacher preparation.

Management and organisation

The Teachers’ Professional Development Project is managed under a not for profit Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), whose Director (Curriculum) is Professor Peter N Chonjo, a Science Education professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, together with Mr. Moulali Shaik, a retired Education Officer, as the managing Director. The project has also recruited some technical and support Staff to take care of the daily activities. IICD has played and continues to play a vital role in the project including: To provide support in terms project formulation, assist in fundraising activities, furnish Project advisory and promotion services when needed, and active in capturing and disseminating best practices and learnt lessons.

Market and finance

Beneficiaries of this project are mainly teachers and Tutors at the Teachers’ Teaching Colleges (TTCs) on one hand, while on the other hand are the Teacher trainees. The training programme will hopefully be extended to teachers of Secondary schools in the country.

The project has two types of funding mechanisms. One is through Donors’ Funding and the other is through nominal training fees charged to teachers who receive ICT training from the project. It is envisaged that the small training fees collected will make the project sustainable.

Project Owner : Bright Education Trust Fund, constituted of Prof. Peter.N Chonjo and Mr. Shaik Moulali.

Project Partners : Kambangwa Secondary School, a model school.

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