What Is ICT Education and Why Is It Important? Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) education is basically our society’s efforts to teach its current and emerging citizens valuable knowledge and skills around computing and communications devices, software that operates them, applications that run on them and systems that are built with them. What are these things? How do they work? How do you use them productively? How are they deployed, assembled, managed and maintained to create productive systems? How they are used in specific business and industry settings? settings? What are the underlying science and technologies behind them and how might those be developed to advance ICT fields? ICT is complex and quickly changing, ch anging, and it is confusing for many man y people. It is so pervasive in the modern world that everyone ever yone has some understanding of it, but those understandings are often wildly divergent. There are many important dimensions to ICT education, including: Today, everyone needs a basic understanding of ICT and ICT/Digital Literacy – Today, how to make productive use of it, just to be good students, workers and citizens. Teaching people how to be competent basic users of ICT technologies is an important role of ICT education, so they will be successful in their academic and work careers, and so they can efficiently participate in modern technical society. As part of its study validating U.S. Department of Labor IT Competency model content in California, MPICT determined with 99% confidence California employer agreement with the following statements regarding Digital Literacy:
o
o
“Information and communication technologies (ICT) competencies are increasingly important for most of our employers, regardless of role. If there was an agreed-upon standard for "digital literacy", or ICT competencies expected of all workers, regardless of workplace role, my organization would value a credential based on that standard as a way of validating ICT skills for non-ICT non-ICT workers.” (70.5% agree or very much agree) “In the 21st century, an ability to work with information and communication communication technologies is becoming as essential to education, life and workplace success as "reading, writing and arithmetic".” ICT Digital Literacy should be considered a basic skill by educational systems, something taught to and assessed for all students. (85.2% agree or very much agree)
o
This study details 49 competencies for ICT User level knowledge and skills, as an actionable, teachable and assessable definition of what people need to know and be able to do to be “digitally literate.”
ICT Infrastructure and Support Applied Technologists – Beyond a basic user competency, our society also needs more knowledgeable and capable technical people to deploy, manage and maintain ICT equipment, software and systems, so they work well for users. In all industries, these people mana ge computer and communications hardware, software and applications; networked systems; online information sharing, communication and commerce systems; business processes making use of these systems; and user support. Specialized Business and Industry Uses of ICT – As enabling technologies, ICT is used strategically in almost all businesses and industries. Many have develop ed specialized systems and uses of ICT, and many h ave specialized legal and regulatory requirements; quality control systems; integrations with production and research equipment and systems; security requirements; and software applications. For example: o
o
o
o
o
o
Bioscience industries rely on specialized ICT systems and applications to conduct research, analyze organic materials, produce biotech products and do required reporting; Financial services industries rely on ICT to maintain customer records, do business, conduct trades, do financial reporting, secure proprietary information and comply with regulations; Manufacturing industries use specialized computer controlled systems and robotics to design, produce and test products. Property management operations use ICT to network and control heating and cooling, lighting and building access systems. Electric utilities use ICT to monitor and manage electricity distribution, customer billing and smart metering systems. Telecommunications, cable TV and other entertainment indu stries use ICT to store content, manage customers and deliver their services.
We need to develop a competent workforce that understands not only relevant technologies, but also specialized business and industry environments and operations, to meet these specialized needs.
ICT Research and Development Scientists – ICT fields themselves are under constant pressure to evolve and improve. We need people who deeply understand the science and technologies underlying ICT and who can work to advance the
fields. In virtually all modern businesses and industries, and in m odern society in general, ICT has key strategic roles. It is strategically important to develop citizens and workers who can competently and efficiently operate and add value in these systems and environments.
What Is ICT Education and Why Is It Important? The Uses of ICTs in Education
THE ROLE OF ICT IN EDUCATION SECTOR By: Saverinus Kaka, S.Pd.
Nowadays the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), especially internet in the education sector plays an important role, especially in the
process of empowering the technology into the educational activities. Education sector can be the most effective sector to anticipate and eliminate the negative impact of ICT. Technology (internet) in another side can be the most effective way to increase the student s knowledge. ’
Being aware of the significant role of ICT (internet) in our life, especially in the educational activities, education authorities should be wise enough in implementing the strategies to empower ICT in supporting the teaching and learning process in the classroom. ICT is not just the bloom of the educational activities, but also it will be the secondary option to improve the effective and meaningful educational process. The
main
purpose of
the
Strategy
for
Information
and
Communication
Technology Implementation in Education is to provide the prospects and trends of integrating information and communication technology (ICT) into the general educational activities.
There are some unavoidable facts in the modern education;
the ICT has
been developing very rapidly nowadays. Therefore, in order to balance it, the whole educational system should be reformed and ICT should be integrated into educational activities. the influence of ICT, especially internet (open source tool) cannot be ignored in our student s lives. So, the learning activities should be reoriented and ’
reformulated, from the manual source centered to the open source ones. In this case the widely use of internet access has been an unavoidable policy that should be anticipated by schools authorities. the presence of multimedia games and online games by internet has been another serious problem that should be wisely handled by the educational institutions. The students cannot be exterminated from this case. They can have and do with it wherever and whenever they want. Schools, as a matter of fact, do not have enough power and time to prevent or stop it after school times. Meanwhile, most parents do not have enough times to accompany and control their children. So, the students have large opportunities to do with multimedia games or online games or browsing the negative and porn sites . Having been addicted, the students will have too little time to study, and
even do not want to attend classes. In such situation, education institutions play an important role to eradicate these problems. One of which is by facilitating the students to do edutainment or educational games. Schools can let their students be familiar with educational games adjusted by their teachers. Besides, they can also support and facilitate their students to have their own blogs in the internet. A lot of WebBlog providers are free to the users, such as WordPress . In their blogs, the students can create and write something, like an article,
poem, news, short stories, features, or they can also express their opinion by an online forum provided in the internet. They are able to share experiences throughout their blogs to others from all over the world. I think it will be an interesting activity for them, and it will lessen their time to visit the negative or porn sites existed.
By doing so, I think our young generation will get more and more information and knowledge by browsing in the internet. They can also create innovation in web design that it may be out of the formal curriculum content, but it will be useful for their future. the implementation of ICT in education has not been a priority trend of educational reform and the state paid little attention to it. Therefore, there should be an active participation, initiative and good will of the schools and the government institutions to enhance ICT implementation at school. the teachers should be the main motivator and initiator of the ICT implementation at schools. The teachers should be aware of the social change in their teaching activities. They should be the agent of change from the classical method into the modern one. They must also be the part of the global change in learning and teaching modification. The followings are the aim and objectives of ICT implementation in education:
1. To implement the principle of life-long learning / education. 2. to increase a variety of educational services and medium / method. 3. to promote equal opportunities to obtain education and information. 4. to develop a system of collecting and disseminating educational information. 5. to promote technology literacy of all citizens, especially for students. 6. to develop distance education with national contents. 7. to promote the culture of learning at school (development of learning skills, expansion of optional education, open source of education, etc.) 8. to support schools in sharing experience and information with others.
