Course Descriptions at a Glance

Semester 2 All Students

M4 Building Effective and Efficient Pedagogical

Practices

We may be able to use ICTs to teach more efficiently, but that does not mean that our teaching is more effective. This course will provide teachers with the competencies they need to determine what works and what doesn’t. We will base our work upon actual classroom experiences, rather than abstract theories. Emerging teachers will be provided models and simulations so that they can observe excellent pedagogical practices at work.

Year 1 Semester 1 All Students

M1 High-Tech, High-Touch, High-Teach

This course focuses on ICT-enhanced classroom efficiency and effectiveness. Course design, student records, computational applications, and templates create a sense of organization for the teachers and provide a structure for learning. Integrated into this module will be elements of learning itself, such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

M2 Building 21st Century

Skills and Content Mastery

Critical thinking and problem solving are essential skills for the 21st century. To get there, we must ensure that students can demonstrate their abilities in a wide variety of ways, including ICTs. Collaboration, creativity, and communication skills not only enable you to build those skills in yourselves, but also enhance your ability to make informed decisions and learn from and with each other. In short, your 21st century skills will enhance those of your students.

M3 Personalized & Self-Regulated Learning

ICT-enhanced self-regulated learning allows teachers to build in students the keys to self-reliance, including study skills and self-regulation techniques that allow which learners transform their mental abilities into academic skills so that learning is viewed as an activity that students do for themselves.

M5 Problem Solving,

Modeling, and Simulation

Problem-solving involves seeking information, generating new knowledge, and making decisions to address real-life challenges and then model solutions. Students must understand the academic components of the coursework, describe any barriers to learning, explore how to overcome those barriers. Visual representations, mind-maps, manipulatives, time-tables, diagramming and graphic organizers will help students organize and represent their thinking. Teachers will be trained to help students monitor their own learning, develop strategies they can use in multiple situations, and evaluate results. Exhibitions can allow students to share their work.

M6 Professional Portfolios

A professional teaching portfolio, like an artist's portfolio, shows the range of one's work. Portfolios are also tools to reflect on the arc of one's teaching experience and growth. This course is the key to self-understanding and the capacity to examine what you are doing, how, and why. You will be asked to represent a challenge you have overcome using ICTs, provide demonstrations of ICT effectiveness in the classroom, and the use of student work to demonstrate your success. It is a key factor in your professional career because it helps build teacher communities of practice.

Year 2 Semester 3 All Students

M7 Performance Based Assessments 1

This course is an extension of Performance Based Assessments 1 by strengthening the capacity of teachers to recognize student leaning and focus on remediation if need be. We will also explore how students with different learning needs can participate successfully in a mainstream environment.

M8 Developing and Extending Curriculum

Curriculum cannot be static, but dynamic. This course ensures that teachers reach the highest standards, but have the flexibility to incorporate ICTs dynamically and creatively in their classrooms. As Suriname rolls out its new curriculum, this is an opportunity for teachers to share best practice. Teachers will work in curriculum teams, by grade level, so that they can strengthen core subject-matter mastery and extend curriculum to meet local needs

M9 Websites and Digital Devices

We don't have to keep up with students or even be ahead of them, but we should give them the opportunity to work within a safe and educationally productive environment. This course explores those contemporary ICT capabilities basic to participation in a global environment, and also explores media literacy, cyber-security, and personal safety. In addition, teachers will even be able to customize applications to meet the needs of their specific classrooms.

Semester 4 All Students

M10 Performance Based Assessments 2

This course is an extension of Performance Based Assessments 1 by strengthening the capacity of teachers to recognize student leaning and focus on remediation if need be. We will also explore how students with different learning needs can participate successfully in a mainstream environment.

M11 Solving ICT Problems in Your School

While we can recognize the problems that may arise as an ICT mentor in your school, this course allows students to read the research about what may serve as a problem in their own schools and to prepare accordingly. Elements of adult-learning shall be integrated into practical applications that allow schools to build an ICT-enabled culture.

M12 ICT and Your Community

Participatory evaluation of community needs extends problem-solving and service learning practices into real-life situations, even regional and global exhibitions. We will explore pressing issues in one's community and connect the teacher and students to an issue for which they can make a true contribution. At the same time, we will demonstrate how this process (a) addresses core academic standards and (b) focuses on measurable results

Year 3 Semester 5 Year 3 Students

M13 Interdisciplinary IT for Inclusion

Course focuses on the integration of multidisciplinary STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) subjects with a special focus on diverse learners, integrating multiple intelligences, personalized learning, and visual media

M14 Data-Driven Decision Making

BIG: Business, Industry, and Government always produces a massive amount of data that needs to be organized, understood, visualized, mined, and analyzed in order to recognize patterns and help data-driven decision making with direct relevance to educational change.

M15_e1 ICT for Safety (Elective) ICT offers new opportunities, but it also poses dangers. We will cover issues such as cyber and identity safety; creating environments to ensure that children are physically and emotionally safe; social networks and bullying

M15_e2 Mentorship for Mastery (Elective)

Professors and local mentors will conduct an assessment of emerging teachers and provide personalized, intensive experiences to ensure that their professional portfolio matches the standards of the ICT in Education program. The focus will be on subject-matter and pedagogical mastery, along with the capacity of teachers to connect to their colleagues to grow even further professionally.

Semester 6 Year 3 Students

M16 Field Study Practicum

Emerging teachers are given opportunities to have direct teaching experiences by observing and working in classrooms led by master teachers. Those master teachers will be given special recognition for their contribution to future teacher development by mentoring emerging teachers and working to ensure they meet national standards

M17 Education for Sustainable

Development

Sustainable development is a road-map, an action plan, and a focus on achieving sustainability in any activity that uses resources. ICTs are not an end unto itself but a seamless part of every day life, but if we don't educate for the future, then we put future generations at risk. This course shows the relationship between natural resources and national resources by teaching students to use ICTs to create a sustainable future.

M18_e1 ICTs and Special Topics (Elective)

The combination of professional passion and practice comes together in a course in which teachers address issues of burning importance to them and design EITHER: (1) A curriculum unit connected to the national curriculum (2) a community project for which teachers would play a clear, measurable result.

M18_e2 ICT for Health (Elective)

Next-generation health solutions focused on Suriname. This course will provide ICTs that address health issues teachers can recognize and integrate into their classrooms, as well as ICT that is currently in the health system. STEM subjects associated with health range from heart monitors to new concepts in disease prevention and healthy habits