Use of ICT in making education more enjoying

Access to information (A2i) is an important programme under the Bangladesh Prime Minister's Office (PMO) which is financially supported by UNDP and USAID. A2i has been working successfully with a view to making Bangladesh a digitally developed and transforming Bangladesh into a middle income country. Most of the people in Bangladesh, irrespective to their education and financial level, are being greatly benefited from the digital services of the state. If the popular use of ICT and ICT services continues at this rate, Bangladesh will be a digital country soon where people can get all sorts of services at their door step.
A2i started its journey in 2007 aiming at e-service delivery for transparency and responsiveness with the new and improved version of the programme. Similar to the first phase, the second phase of the project is being implemented by the PMO to drive innovation in service delivery. The overall objective of the project is to provide support in building a digital nation delivering services at the citizen's doorsteps. Now money can be transferred electronically; electricity bills, cell phone top up, admission fees deposit and so on can be done through a cell phone. Government offices upload orders, invitation letters, notices and other circulars through their websites or send them to the emails of the service seekers.
As  part of its programme, A2i has done a lot to increase the use of ICT in education. So far, they have trained more than 20,500 secondary education level teachers and provided the same number of schools with laptops, multi-media projectors, speakers, modems etc to enable teachers to use digital contents in the classrooms. A2i has taken some important steps to remodel education system. In this regard, it is working for establishing multimedia classrooms in secondary schools, madrasas and training teachers in making ICT-aided educational contents on hard-to-grasp topics and making electronic versions of text books of primary and secondary levels available on the NCTB website. A2i has so far trained about 40,000 teachers who are expected to use ICT in teaching and learning. They are also working for activating Union Information Centre (UIC) in order to reach the IT services even to the remotest villagers. According to A2i, newly established non-stop service outlets are being operated at 4,547 union parishads throughout the country. The rural people are really welcoming the services and telemedicine service is one of the most popular value-added services in the respective areas it is available.
As part of its service to the education sector, some 32 teacher educators including Professor Faroque Ahmed, Consultant of A2I, came to Faridpur Teachers' Training College to work together in making some model digital contents on the lessons teachers have not yet prepared and uploaded on the Shikkhok Batayon and to give feedback to those contents already uploaded on the Shikkhok Batayon.  Mentionalbe, any teacher of the country can use the contents in their teaching from the repertoire. They can also edit if they like to do that. The group worked hard under the guidance of Professor Faroque Ahmed, Professor Motiar Rahman, Principal, Teacher's Training College, Faridpur provided all possible support to make the training successful and enjoyable. The team worked very hard, they were seen to work till 10 at night. We, the honours students, were astonished to see a group of hard working teachers motivated to make changes in the field of education. Professor Faroque Ahmed, pedagogy and e-learning specialist of A2i deserves salute for his level of motivation and hard-working nature. We believe that those days are not very far when every organisation and every home in Bangladesh will be digitally equipped; people of all walks of life will be the users of IT.

The writers are first year B.Ed Honours students at Government Teachers' Training College in Faridpur, [email protected]