As the nation grapples with the deadly Corona Pandemic, schools are inevitably closed,and reopening is no way near in sight. What was presumed to be a temporary closure, turned into weeks, months, and then a year. Some schools then devised ways of keeping the learners engaged.
However the methods of engaging the learners remotely involved the use of ICTs. Luckily for secondary schools, the subject of ICT has been there for two decades at O Level and a decade for A Level. This meant that employing digital methods to engage learners remotely would be a walk in the park. Therefore, it was presumed that the ICT departments of these schools would be at the forefront of pushing the schools’ digital agenda.
Unfortunately,the existence of ICT teachers in a school was not enough to solve the current crisis. It is now every administrator’s knowledge that teaching ICT as a subject and using ICTs in Education are two totally different things.
Over the past years, it was wrongly presumed that ICTs in education were a preserve of teachers of ICT. The closure of schools due to the pandemic, has exposed the need for every teacher to go digital.
The demand for the 21st century digital teacher therefore kept increasing as the methodologies of teaching and learning necessitated research at all levels of education. this therefore meant that teachers had to rhyme with the demand at hand or else be systematically kicked. In some schools since most of the teachers were not as “digital’ the digital demand was therefore left to fall on the shoulders of ICT teachers and school secretaries. Did these teachers ever wonder how long this would go on?
The new curriculum an the 21st century learners necessitated for the integration of ICt skills in the teaching and learning of different topics and subjects. The use of ICTs in teaching and learning is not a preserve of ICt as a subject, but an inevitable element of current generation classrooms.
