With the goal of enabling teachers to use ICT to enhance the quality of teaching and learning, the UNESCO ICT in Education Programme has implemented a number of regional, sub-regional and national projects. This section lists those projects and outlines their activities and achievements.

The 2005 Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report highlights the importance of high quality education in the achievement of EFA goals as follows:

“… the achievement of universal participation in education will be fundamentally dependent upon the quality of education available. For example, how well pupils are taught and how much they learn, can have a crucial impact on how long they stay in school and how regularly they attend. Furthermore, whether parents send their children to school at all is likely to depend on judgements they make about the quality of teaching and learning provided – upon whether attending school is worth the time and cost for their children and for themselves.” (UNESCO, EFA Global Monitoring Report 2005, p.28)

The EFA Global Monitoring Report also confirms the central role of teachers in any education system, emphasizing that the quality of education is directly linked to how well teachers are prepared for teaching.

In today’s world teachers need to be equipped not only with subject-specific expertise and effective teaching methodologies, but with the capacity to assist students to meet the demands of the emerging knowledge-based society. Teachers therefore require familiarity with new forms of information and communication technology and need to have the ability to use that technology to enhance the quality of teaching and learning.

Many countries in the Asia-Pacific region have realized the need for providing teachers with training in ICT and have launched various professional development initiatives. However, many of the training activities to date have been one-off, crash courses which focus on computer literacy and do not enable teachers to integrate ICT in their day-to-day teaching activities and master the use of ICT as an effective tool to improve teaching and learning.

In this context, the UNESCO ICT in Education programme seeks to assist in ensuring that all teachers in the Asia-Pacific region receive quality training in the use of ICT.

Projects implemented as part of the ICT in Education programme include:

• Facilitating Effective ICT-pedagogy Integration
• The Next Generation of Teachers (Next Gen) project
• ICT in Education Teacher Training Modules for Developing Countries
• Training and Professional Development of Teachers and Other Facilitators for Effective Use of ICTs in Improving Teaching and Learning
• Bridging the Within-Country Digital Divide in Education: Improving Education in Western China through Innovative Use of ICT
• Training of teachers in information technology in Sri-Lanka
• Establishing effective use of ICT in EFA in Cambodia

Related links:

• UNESCO (Global) Teacher Education website