Program Summary

The Rural Enabling Information Technology Education (REITE) project intends to enable head teachers and teachers in rural schools to use IT and to utilise IT to improve their teaching. The outputs of this project are: local support teams of teachers with IT training and skills to support teachers in integrating IT into their work; needs-based IT training materials; and a research report on the project’s impact on teachers’ capacity.

Why we are doing it?

IT is an essential skill in the Information Age. The Government realises the importance of IT and hence has provided hardware to schools, including some schools in rural areas.

Due to the lack of an IT environment at home, school is the only place that children in these areas have opportunities to learn about IT. Unfortunately, effective IT training is absent in rural schools and thus the effectiveness of the hardware is limited. To provide better IT education to children, the first necessary step is to train their teachers to use IT effectively. If the teachers are unable to use computers themselves, they cannot effectively teach children how to use them. Unlike the traditional approach, this project focuses on the actual needs of teachers in IT education and takes an approach to “enable” teachers with the skills they need to integrate IT into their classroom teaching. To understand the impact of this project for future mainstreaming, quantitative and qualitative assessment will be conducted.

Our Approach

We will set-up local groups consisting of teachers and head teachers in rural schools based on their motivation, capacity and understanding about IT education. They will be trained on how to use IT and how to help others use IT.  In both cases the intention is that they use IT to improve their everyday work. These local groups will be trainers for other teachers and provide training based on their own experiences. The training materials will include their own examples on how IT can solve every day problems. Research will be conducted to see how this training improves the trainee’s IT capacity and awareness; thus assessing how the project could be scaled up.

Program Goals

·      Improve Teachers’ ICT Teaching and Learning ability

·     Build capacity of local teachers through increasing technical ability

·      Case study capacity building

·      Create Teaching  Resources

·      Train teachers to provide child-centred teaching through IT in all subjects of study, and help children to access interactive learning

·      Promote the project’s experiences and outcomes

Program Activities

·         Building the Capacity of Schools:  The program will help pilot schools to set up IT learning facilities and interactive multimedia libraries, and work with teachers, head teachers and children to identify their needs in IT learning and teaching.  

·         Developing a Local Trainers Support Network: Plan China will work with the local education bureau to form a network of local trainers from teachers and head teachers of schools. The Network will provide localised technical support among schools. Training to teachers is developed by this trainer network on a case-based system, helping teachers and head teachers to solve the daily issues they face.

·         Program Documentation: Plan China and Peking University will document the impacts of the interventions on children and teachers through data-based research, identify the most effective intervention and propose an approach to integrate IT education with the distance learning program.

Program Partners

Peking University is responsible for developing the curriculum for the teachers, providing training, supporting and monitoring the education process of the teachers. 

The Peking University team is the experts on ICT curriculum in this project; they are responsible for the development of resources, teachers’ knowledge and communication with the teachers to ensure the development to their full capacity.The Ministry of Education will be invited to conduct an independent evaluation on the project.  This will publicise the results on the REITE project to the government and provide an independent monitoring and evaluation result for the project.

Future of the Program

Plan China’s goal is to Scale-up the program and disseminate the learning of this program within the education system and include the approach identified into the mainstream IT-related program financed by the Ministry of Education.

Impact

The expected project areas will be 400 schools in 5 counties in Plan China’s project areas, the direct beneficiary will be 400 head teachers, 2,000 teachers and 80,000 children and their families. Once the teachers are better able to use IT themselves, they will be better able to educate children about IT. Thus the intended impact will be for the children to receive better IT education. In addition, the teachers will be able to better use IT in their personal lives, in their teaching; the head teachers will be able to better use IT to manage their schools.