The government should improve programmes to impart secondary school teachers in Mbeere region in Embu County with Information Communication and Technology (ICT) skills to facilitate their successful utilization in teaching, education experts have said.
The experts on curriculum development and institutional management issues said that although there was general presence and use of computers across most schools, the degree at which ICT was embraced in teaching and learning remained negligibly low.
Research done by three leading scholars – Verasia Mukwaiti Murungi from Kenya Methodist University and Dr. Tarsilla M. Kibaara and Terry M. Mwaniki both from Catholic University of Eastern Africa – on the impact of implementing information technology on teaching in public secondary schools in the area revealed low entrenchment of ICT in the education sector all blamed on a cross-section of hitches.
The Ministry of Education, the educationists said, should help in the rationalization of teacher workloads so as to leave them with adequate free time to train in ICT skills which can impact positively in acquisition of skills.
They also recommended that training on computer applications should be considered to form part of the secondary school teacher training curriculum so that the teachers who graduate are able to apply the skills during teaching.
The suggestion by the researchers was linked to the fact that youthful teachers who had taught for few years were found to be the more likely to use ICT in classroom instruction compared to those with several years of teaching experience.
Teachers with less than three years teaching experience were using 48 per cent of their time on computers, those with 4-9 years 45 percent of their time and those with 10-19 years’ work experience used up to 57 percent of their time on the computers.
Teachers with 20 years and above experience, it emerged used a mere 33 percent of their time on computers hence ‘new teachers might have been exposed to computers during and before the training and thus they are comfortable and confident using the tool during classroom instruction.’
Interestingly these are the same skills being taunted as the magic bullet in improving access to knowledge and skills through teaching and learning requiring implementation by ICT utilization.
The scholars challenged the government to hasten programmes to roll out the national ICT policy in public secondary schools countrywide where the situation could be the same.
For effective implementation of ICT in teaching and learning to take place in secondary schools, the scholars insisted that teachers needed to be trained in computer applications and ICT-related courses.
They said internet connectivity was another drawback and had wide ranging negative effects in use of ICT in teaching with more than 70 per cent of the schools confessing to lacking good connectivity and high charges on data bundles.
The heavy workload for secondary school teachers was cited as another reason why teacher uptake of ICT was minimal, the research revealed this against a background where provided training packages were inadequate to fully equip them with skills to be able to teach.
Worse still, schools in the sub-county, had not fully implemented the government ICT policy in teaching and learning, hence it turned out that all the independent variables; learner teacher and school related strategies were found to have a detrimental effect on implementation of use of ICT in teaching and learning in the schools.
The study concluded that schools in Mbeere sub-county, where tutors who had acquired ICT skills being few, it was suggested that teachers’ interaction with computers should be improved at all levels.
By Robert Nyagah
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