The Digital Literacy in Teachers of the Schools of Rajouri (J&K)-India: Teachers Perspective

The present age is the age of information. The globalization has affected every sphere of the life including education. In spite of availability of ICT infrastructure in schools, their potential is underutilized because of digital incompetence of the teachers. New digital technologies are acting as a catalyst towards improvement of learning outcome and enhancing quality of education, but only introduction of such technologies in schools for producing change and innovation is not enough, it requires digitally competent teachers to facilitate the use of ICT in education. These teachers will act as facilitators and mentors to students to lead them towards problem solving and innovation to meet the new challenges of globalization. Teachers must be able to create learning environments which are student centric and foster creativity, Meta cognition, meta-literacy, collaboration and communication in learners. Mere superficial use of ICT in teaching will not yield the required learning outcome, but the integration of ICT in pedagogy is important to enhance teaching, learning process. This can be done only when teachers are competent enough to use ICT tools and facilitate ICT integrated education. In this paper, we tried to assess the teacher's perspective about the ICT and investigate the factors responsible for resistance of teachers in using ICT in schools and suggestive measures for successful integration of ICT in the teaching process by the teachers of Rajouri district (J&K, India). The ICT skills are very important for teachers to support alternative modes of teaching, learning, i.e. e-learning, mobile learning in the present outbreak of pandemic disease caused by Coronavirus-COVID19.