ICT IN SCHOOL EDUCATION

What are some of the key challenges faced using ICT in school education with regard to ICT infrastructure?

• Uncontrolled access to the Internet for all students is very expensive
• Satisfactory Internet access for the students in a school is difficult to provide in most areas of the country outside the big cities
• The Internet in schools poses problems of misuse (like visiting educationally useless and undesirable sites)
• Attempts to use ICT in education are relatively ineffective unless the student gets content in his/her own language and content relevant to the curriculum. Suitable and adequate content should be planned for when the physical infrastructure is planned. 
• Educational TV offers the raw material for computer based video and multi-media instruction in Indian languages.

Local Area Networks (LANs) are very important for educational institutions, particularly because Internet

access is a problem. If content is available for hosting on the LAN, it would play a valuable role. Ideally a good part of the content should be in the video form. Interactive multi-media material would also be valuable.

We should make such resources available over every school LAN, instead of trying to make them accessible over the Internet. The bandwidth required for these is quite high, and the LAN is the cost-effective solution to provide this bandwidth. This will overcome many of the problems listed above. I have a few other suggestions in relation to infrastructure.

India has excellent satellite TV infrastructure and has invested significantly in educational TV. Due to technical advances, a school can now spend only Rs 2500 on DTH equipment once to get a 1.5 Mbps digital link (that is what satellite TV uses), which in turn

brings video content for free. Some Indian educational channels are planning to switch to DTH soon, and it is

very practical for them to do this.

Due to the rapid fall in the cost of servers and storage, it is entirely possible to record in digital form into

a server thousands of hours of TV programmes, and make it available on demand from every PC on the

LAN. It is easy to make a specified program available over the LAN according to a schedule to as many classrooms and PCs as are required. 

We can simultaneously provide for any set of Classrooms/PCs to access programmes that are required individually, without depending on a time schedule. A digital library on a server on the LAN would be a valuable asset, as it will store all types of digital content. ICT is perceived as expensive. It need not be so, if

a PC and a projector are used for a class as a whole. Such a facility should ideally be available in every

classroom. The classroom PC-cum-projector facility can be used even to administer quizzes and tests. Objective type questions can be displayed on the screen and students can be asked to write down the answers.

Alternatively, the teacher can call out students at random to answer a given question for the benefit of the

class. The teacher can correct wrong answers, explaining why that answer was not the correct one. Can you

offer advice on ways in which school ICT Infrastructure can be used as community learning centres after

the school hours?