Chapter 10: Benchmarks for Teacher Education With Respect to Ict

If the internet is an information superhighway, then teachers just might be the road-kill on the asphalt (Kirschner & Selinger, 2003). Possibly, for the first time in history, students can use the tools necessary for acquiring and transmitting knowledge better than their teachers. Children everywhere are creating their own virtual communities with these new technologies. They chat to stay synchronously in touch with both old and new friends and email and send short messages to stay in touch asynchronously. They take part in discussion groups, navigate through virtual worlds and assimilate new hardware and software effortlessly. In many ways they are light-years ahead of their parents and teachers with respect to the possibilities of ICT. As a result students are getting bored and frustrated and teachers are getting frustrated and distraught. This chapter presents examples of good practice and benchmarks for calibration or modeling ICT-teacher training or both, and a number of pedagogical and policy repercussions of their adoption.