Plenary Session I: ICT in Education Policy, Plan and Monitoring
Technology in Education: Transforming Teaching and Learning
Shelly Esque, Vice President, Legal and Corporate Affairs and Director, Corporate Affairs Group, INTEL Corporation, USA.
Our world is in transition, creating tremendous opportunities as well as competition for jobs and economic development. Countries are facing immense challenges in ensuring that their education systems are ready to prepare the next generation to take advantage of the opportunities.
We know that ICT is playing an increasingly important role in not just the way we work, but also in the way we gather, assimilate and use information to create knowledge which is increasingly becoming the backbone of modern economies. This knowledge economy brings with it the need for a vast range of complex skills in the workforce, so that knowledge workers collaborate better, communicate effectively, critically evaluate options and successfully compete on a global scale.
This in turn necessitates the need for education transformation to match the new paradigms and the effective use of ICT cannot be ignored. While there is an ever increasing use and induction of ICT into the education systems across the world, it is critical that the usage models of ICT defined by any country fall in line with not just the desired short-term educational outcomes, but also align with the long-term vision that the country has set for itself.
It is thus extremely critical that as we march down the path to transform education, we know what the end goal looks like and have relevant mechanisms in place to measure the educational outcomes, as well as monitor the effectiveness of our actions.