Phd

Annual Progress Seminar 1 : Report , PPT 

Summary: Indian school teachers have difficulty in designing learner-centric lesson plans. Tsai and Chai (2012) argues that the lack of design thinking by teachers is the important “third-order barrier” for technology integration. Design thinking is defined as the ‘dynamic creation of knowledge and practice’ by the teachers  in response to the pedagogical affordances provided by the ICT tools (Tsai & Chai, 2012). As  classroom context and  students are quite dynamic, the teacher should rely on some design thinking to re-organise or create learning materials and activities, adapting to the instructional needs for different contexts or varying groups of learners. The enhancement of design thinking for teachers is not a major component  of teacher education programs. In my research direction, I would be designing a collaborative technology enhanced learning environment to foster teachers’ development of learning design.

Annual Progress Seminar 2: Report, PPT

Summary: In traditional classrooms worldwide, one of the most common strategies is lecturing, sometimes with the help of technology tools. An important barrier to the effective integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) has been identified to be the inability of teachers in creating effective student-centered learning designs (Tsai & Chai, 2012).  Use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education has the potential to significantly impact teaching and learning (Spector, 2013; Krejins et.al, 2013). They facilitate achievement of important teaching-learning objectives like improving students’ prediction and reasoning skill (Riess & Mischo, 2010), increase conceptual and procedural understanding (Byrne et.al, 1999; Laasko et.al, 2009) among others. But the achievement of these objectives is subject to effective integration of ICT in teaching by the teachers (Bratina et.al, 2002). Effective integration is defined as ‘ICT functioning as an integral or mediated tool to accomplish specific teaching or learning activities to meet certain instructional objectives’ (Lim & Hang, 2003). This is achieved when teacher design student centered, active learning activities exploiting affordances of the ICT tool (Mishra &Koehler, 2006; Angeli & Valanides, 2009; Tsai & Chai, 2014). However, teachers are unable to design such activities with ICT (Angeli & Valanides, 2009; Laurillard, 2012; Bennett et.al, 2015). This lack of teachers’ design thinking has been identified as an important barrier to effective ICT integration in teaching (Tsai & Chai, 2012). Design thinking is defined as the ‘dynamic creation of knowledge and practice’ by the teachers in response to the pedagogical affordances provided by the ICT tools (Tsai & Chai, 2012). Thus the broad problem targeted in this thesis is ineffective ICT integration by teachers due to their inability to design effective teaching-learning activities.