In depth

Beyond the School is a project currently being introduced to UK schools by the Centre for Modern Education. It is a heritage education project that uses digital technology to contrast old and new images of the local area. Students can use it to explore how their local environment has changed over a period of time and publish the results in both hard copy and electronic format.

The document makes recommendations for improving access to primary education of good quality for all children, especially the poorest. It compiles the outcomes of the Experts’ Meeting on Primary Education for All Children, organized in the Gambia, and several national studies on the status of primary education.

"Monitoring and Evaluation of ICT in Education Projects: A Handbook for Developing Countries" is a quick introduction and guide to help busy policymakers and practitioners understand and assess the ICT-related investments underway in the education sector.

There has been considerable research and development into the use of multimedia in teaching and learning geospatial science. Geospatial science professions like cartography, geomatics and surveying are practiced-based and therefore are heavily reliant upon the application of knowledge to practical situations in the field.

What can ICT bring for the inhabitants of 600,000 Indian villages? How India is empowering the poor and marginalised citizens to participate in the emerging knowledge society? How will India provide voice to her millions of citizens? ‘Taking ICT to every Indian village: Opportunities and challenges”, attempts at answering such questions and exploring the complex interactions between ICT and society. more...

The countries of the Asia-Pacific region are increasingly discovering the potential of information and communication technologies (ICT) to expand educational opportunities and accelerate national socio-economic development.

Information and communication technologies must be harnessed to support
Education for All goals at an affordable cost. They have great potential for knowledge dissemination, effective learning and the development of more efficient education services. To be effective, especially in developing countries, ICT should be combined with more traditional technologies such as books and radios and be more extensively applied to the training of teachers.

This article argues that collaborative partnerships, social network strategies and the building of social capital at the local level are key issues for the successful adoption of ICT for development. In this article, the authors describe two successful community ICT projects whose success depended on the use of a collaborative methodology involving universities, governments and communities.

This article explores the assertion that the development of educational multimedia has a key role to play in effectively reducing the impacts of the digital divide particularly in the context of developing nations.

Recent work at infoDev created a “Knowledge Map” of what is known – and what isn’t – about information and communication technology (ICT) use in education.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been adopted by the United Nations as the key development targets for the first part of the 21st century. All nations are “on board.”

The Digital Education Enhancement Project (DEEP) is exploring how information and communications technologies (ICTs) can improve the quality of teacher education and learning. Research looks at primary schools in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province and in Cairo, Egypt.

Ezer in this dissertation examines how the idea of ICT is constructed at Indian universities, and how this process is impacted by institutional forces. The research findings indicate that for a variety of reasons, higher ICT education in India is markedly Western-focused, instrumental and technocratic.

While the right to education is recognised as fundamental for each citizen, access to it is not guaranteed. In the developing world, the essential building blocks for education systems are suffering from deficiencies, ICT can help respond to these challenges and create the environment that is conducive for effective and quality education systems.

This "Topic"-section gives an overview of the topic of "ICT in class" in the context of international development cooperation. The geographical focus is currently being placed on the African continent.

South Asian tsunami caused widespread destruction and loss of lives and livelihood in the coastal areas of Tamilnadu and Pondichery last winter. OneWorld South Asia and Plan International brought its integrated media training to the east coast region of the Indian Peninsula to train children and youth on using various media to voice their community’s concerns.

Time is ripe for giving some serious consideration to the introduction of ICT-based education at various levels. The use of ICTs as learning tools can supplement and strengthen the institutional system since it can encourage self dependence and creative learning, besides providing new tools for enriching the student-teacher interface.

Multilingualism is a way of life in India but its complexity generates an enormous challenge for education, particularly in India’s remote tribal regions where the languages spoken are different from the languages used in schools. The education provided is often inappropriate for, and even hostile to indigenous minority groups, “creating a barrier to learning achievement”. In order to provide quality education, which takes into consideration the needs of tribal children as learners, it is generally now agreed that the linguistic and cultural heritage must be acknowledged and used. The multilingual education programmes (MLE) using tribal languages and local culture, particularly in the initial stages of education, gradually moving to regional and national languages. This article looks at some of the processes which are required to develop a MLE, including scripting local languages, developing a spelling system, producing a multilingual curriculum and providing resources such as literature and dictionaries with the help of ICTs.

The Indian state government of Chhattisgarh has expanded an Education development centre. An interactive radio instruction initiative (IRI) has been developed to reach approximately one million children. The program is part of a two-state radio initiative that involves 7 million children in more than 80,000 schools.The program works to produce and deliver quality education, notably for girls and other vulnerable populations.It also builds upon the existing state English curriculum, which emphasises listening and speaking skills.

In a world where technology has become one of the most powerful tools to attain global parity, its proliferation has largely been restricted to the more affluent parts of the world. As the digital divide has widened, so have the inequalities in economic opportunity. A computer learning initiative called the Digital Equaliser (DE), initiated in 2002, seeks to bridge the digital and educational divide in India by providing students and communities in India access to digital technology, thereby increasing their economic potential. DE aims to leverage the rapid expansion of digital technology for the assimilation and dissemination of information and knowledge, both curricular and extra curricular.The DE programme is a three-year long programme run in higher secondary schools. In its five years of operation in India it has worked in 190 centers across 12 states and trained over 2700 teachers and 80000 students.