USER FRIENDLY ICTs FOR TEACHER TRAINING PROGRAMMES IN URDU MEDIUM THROUGH DISTANCE LEARNING

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Abstract

The information communication technology (ICT) is playing vital role in present era dominated by technological innovations. The use of ICT is continuously increasing and the use of ICT involves dynamic processes including various concepts, methods, applications. Hence, there is no proper definition of ICT, but for simple understanding the three terms information, communication and technology guide us to make us understand ICT. Precisely this is use of technology for communicating the content and information to the intended communicatee or student.  Thus, ICTs are a “diverse set of technological tools and resources used to communicate, and to create, disseminate, store, and manage information.” The ICTs have been exploited to larger extent by the learners in distance education, as lot of information is being transferred to the learner through use of innovative technologies. There are a large number of technologies listed under ICT. The technologies like radio, television, internet, MS Office, educational blogs, online encyclopedias (like Wikipedia), social networking sites (like Facebook), online resources, mobiles, teleconferences etc. are being utilized prominently by the educators. When the use of technology is examined in the context of minority Indian languages like Urdu, which are geographically widespread and lacks expertise for exploiting the uses of new technologies lot of problems creep in. Hence, there is a need to know User friendly ICTs in teacher training in Urdu medium through Distance Learning. The authors make an effort to discuss the problem at length by citing concrete illustrations of use of ICT for training teachers of Urdu medium schools. This issue is of prominence to the institutes/university like MANUU which is carrying forward the mandate of training of teachers in Urdu medium schools.

Note: This paper was presented in IDEA 2013 conference at MANUU and under consideration of printing in proceedings as on 01.07.2013. The paper can be accessed from https://docs.google.com/document/d/16jJhdf6fCgpWVwmpPcvybyyP4ZF2Cp8zbLvikWKiadE/edit. The accessibility is limited.