For Teacher ICT Integration (CCTI) Partners Meeting Caribbean
C15 - 352 Final Report June 2015
Commonwealth Certificate
For Teacher ICT Integration (CCTI) Partners Meeting –Caribbean
C15 – 352
June 22 – 24 2015
Trinidad and Tobago
SchoolNet South Africa
14th Floor Rennie House
19 Ameshoff Street
Braamfontein, Jhb, 2017
P. O. Box 31493
Braamfontein, 2017
Tel: +27 11 403-5777
Fax: +27 11 403-5272
E-mail:
Web:
Contents
Acknowledgements
Executive Summary
Background
Welcome
Summary of Days 1 and 2
Day 3 Workshop
Country presentations
Lessons learned – Outcomes achieved
Recommendations
Appendix 1 – Programme
Acknowledgements
SchoolNet South Africa would like to thank the Commonwealth of Learning for the opportunity to hold this meeting and particularly Dr.Jessica Aguti for conceptualizing and facilitating the meeting as well as May Li for proficient logistics management of attendance.
Executive Summary
A meeting of Caribbean ministry and higher education officials from thirteen Caribbean countries had been convened by the Commonwealth of Learning to discuss aspects of teacher education in the region. This partners meeting was considered to be a most convenient forum in which to discuss the opportunity for countries to undertake the newly revised CCTI. SchoolNet was therefore invited to take responsibility for the third day of the meeting to orientate countries and to facilitate their planning for the contextualization of the CCTI in their respective countries.
The CCTI has been developed to improve teaching and learning in the classroom using a range of information and communication technologies (ICT) appropriately. An integral component is a focus onschool managers’ involvement in the ICT implementation process in the school. While being designed as a distance education course,the CCTI is aligned with the UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers. The CCTI is an open educational resource (OER) that COL is making available to teacher training institutions throughout the Commonwealth and beyond.
While COL has been supporting institutions and countries to adopt the CCTI, it is has continuously updated and revised the materials in partnership with SchoolNet South Africa. COL now intends to scale up adoption of the CCTI through a new model for more institutions and countries though local partnership with educational institutions and Ministries of Education.
The specific objectives of the Partners’ Meeting was therefore to assist ministries and institutions in thirteen Caribbean countriesto understand the nature of the CCTI and to decide whether to adopt or adapt it. The report outlines the components of the third day of the workshop and summarizes how these objectives were achieved.
Background
The Commonwealth of Learning organized a three-day workshop for teacher education in the Caribbean region from June 22 – 14 inclusive. Orientation to the CCTI and country planning of its contextualization was the subject of the third day of the workshop.
Delegates from the following countries attended the Partners’ Meeting: Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, The Bahamas, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St Vincent and the Grenadines, St Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Three of the countries had some experience of training teachers in the previous version of the CCTI, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda and Trinidad and Tobago. None of the remaining ten countries had had any previous exposure.
Report
Attendance
Not all countries were represented by both a ministry official and a representative of a higher education institution in their country. Furthermore some of the countries were represented by specialists in Special Needs Education and general Teacher Education. Therefore not all countries were represented by the official who was necessarily the most well-informed in the field of ICT in Education.
Welcome
Delegates were welcomed to the workshop by Dr. Morella Joseph who was well-known in the Caricom region as the Programme Manager and Human Resource Development for the Caricom Secretariat. She explained that both COL and CARICOM have similar mandates and that considering the overlapping areas of interest, it had seemed logical to combine into one workshop. Morella explained that COL and CARICOM had the mandates from all Ministers in the region and this embraced education from ECD to tertiary. Both organisations had recently published strategic plans, CARICOM until 2030 and COL until 2021 respectively.
Karen Rosemin, Director of ODL in the ministry welcomed visitors to Trinidad. She explained that her ministry was responsible for post-secondary but also has a directorate for ECD and she apologised on behalf of her minister for not being able to attend the meeting.
Dr. Morella Joseph emphasised that countries were responsible for the implementation of policy and that it was not sufficient to develop standards and draft guidelines and ratify polices. There needed to be impact of quality on teaching and learning.
Summary of Days 1 and 2
Morella introduced Dr Jessica Aguti from COL who started the workshop by explaining the objectives of the meeting. This presentation is available online here Dr Agutigavedelegatesa taste of the agenda for each of the three days and expressed gratitude to all delegates for their attendance. All delegates were then requested to introduce themselves. A vast array of circumstances were outlined by the various country representatives. Most mentioned low levels of qualifications among teaching staff and insufficient attention being given to both SNE and ICT. Morella assured countries that she had taken note of the requests from countries.
The issues that Jessica covered in her presentation are easily discernible from her presentation and covered a range of topics from gender issues, MDGs and SDGs, 21st Century learning, M & E, COL ODL programmes and OER. Jessica’s presentation sparked much well-informed debate. Delegates felt that funding was not the biggest issue; in reality it was buy-in and ownership from ministry officials that was lacking. They appealed for help from COL to alert their governments to their dire needs.
Karen Rosemin from the Trinidad and Tobago Department of Education made a very comprehensive presentation on research that her ministry had conducted with teacher education institutions in the Caribbean region. Not all 43 countries had responded and of those who had, many had submitted seriously out-of-date data. Her presentation is shared here Jessica facilitated the discussion around the report and covered some diverse issues such as private institutions offering teaching qualifications as well as performance appraisals of teachers.
Ms. Joan Spencer-Ernandez then made a highly well-researched presentation on the status of Special Needs Education in the Caribbean region. Her presentation is available here and highlighted the issues around inclusive education without the preparation of teachers for non-homogeneous classrooms.
Jessica started Day 2 by making an excellent summary of the Day 1 proceedings. Day 2 was devoted to the area of quality assurance and specifically to teacher qualifications and their standardisation.
Morella made the first presentation on teacher standards – available online here: This presentation outlined the need for a common qualifications framework and sparked off a great deal of discussion around the standardisation of qualifications across the region’s teacher education institutions.
Dr Paula Mark made the second presentation – available here: was concern over the professionalization of teaching, delegates and presenters alike feeling strongly that the teaching profession should be managed in the same way as the medical profession. There was a need for regulation of the area of teacher education and a need for teachers to remain updated and refreshed in their content and pedagogical domains. There was also concern that there was no standard period of teaching practicum. When surveyed about educational concerns, Ministers of Education across member states had voiced 3 areas of concern: Teacher education; ECD and ICT. It seemed highly appropriate therefore that this 3 day workshop was addressing each of these issues. It was interesting to me as a South African that teachers’ licences across all CARICOM countries are renewable annually following a performance appraisal.
Before the end of Day 2 delegates were informed that they had logins for the CCTI and were therefore free to browse through the modules before the following day.
Day 3 Workshop
Jessica started Day 3 with a word cloud summary of the Day 2 discussions from participant feedback:
This presentation is available here:
Day 3 of the workshop was dedicated to the CCTI. The presentation on the CCTI was made by Janet Thomson from SchoolNet South Africa and is available here:
The presentation covered a brief overview of the history of the qualification and in order to relate to the previous two days’ discussions, some background was given to the positioning of the qualification on the South African Qualifications Framework as well as a brief summary of the functions of the South African Council for Educators.
Previous experiences in the Caribbean were mentioned. Then Doristeen Etinoff was requested to contribute her own feelings about the history of the previous version of the CCTI in Antigua and Barbuda. Doristeen made a most detailed and positive presentation of her country’s experience of the CCTI. St Vincent and the Grenadines also voiced their support of the CCTI. It was drawn to the attention of the delegates that a teacher from St Vincent and the Grenadines and a teacher from Antigua and Barbuda had been so outstanding during their CCTI courses that they had been commissioned to be reviewers of the revised version of the course.
Participants at the workshop really appreciated the message of the video called, “This will revolutionise education.” Most had similar anecdotes to recount from their countries. It took a while to explain why computer skills training was considered to be a complete waste of funding but eventually everyone agreed that integration or the infusion of ICT as they call it in the Caribbean was only going to happen if that was the focus of training and that ICT skills were acquired as a secondary consideration, while in pursuit of the effective use of learning technologies in the classroom.
The alignment of the CCTI to UNESCO was outlined as was the relationship of the CCIT to both the SAMR and the TPACK models of teacher ICT integration. The way that students of the CCTI are assessed was then discussed and delegates appeared in agreement with the weighting of marks and particularly in favour of the allocation to reflection and to collaboration. The video created by one of the first student teachers from Uganda to complete the new CCTI was received with great interest and the value of the new structure and content of the revised CCTI was starting to be appreciated. Before we arrived at the slide outlining the instructional design we had already discussed almost all of these features: social learning, experiential, developmental, collaborative and reflective.
Each delegate had been given a login and password to review the new CCTI the night before. They now divided into 9 groups and each group was allocated a different course. They were only given twenty minutes at most to review these modules and yet each group presented a meaningful and comprehensive presentation on the content of their allocated course. Any recommendations were recorded on video and uploaded to YouTube.
The next portion of the first session for Day 3 comprised Sanjay Mishra’s presentation on the new adoption strategy for countries wishing to adopt the CCTI. The presentation made the roles of each stakeholder very clear and therefore very little discussion ensued.
Break away sessions were then organised for countries to take a short period of time to draw up their plans for the adoption or adaption of the CCTI. Their presentations were to include a very short outline of existing ICT initiatives in the country and to mention any serious challenges that they anticipated.
Country presentations
All countries present at the workshop appeared to be optimistic and positive about the CCTI, even those who were not responsible for ICT in their countries. However we should be mindful of the advice from Joan Ernandez of Jamaica who had emphasized early in the workshop that the main obstacle to implementing initiatives was the lack of buy in and commitment from the ministries.
Despite being given less than an hour to compile presentations on their plans for the contextualization of the CCTI in their countries, all countries managed to make very good presentations. Some of the delegates did not feel they were the most appropriate person to be presenting on this area but still made credible responses to the task. The presentations from countries were all verbal presentations that were videoed. All videos are available from this drop box link: All countries were requested to submit digital versions of their presentations and any other requests to COL to assist with the contextualization of the CCTI within their countries. Marcia Stewart from Jamaica said that they were extremely enthusiastic about their submission and Trinidad had submitted before the workshop closed. See Appendix 2. Overall the presentations were of a high caliber but with more than half a dozen post-doctoral academics in the room it was unlikely to be otherwise.
