Ten principles for using ICT in education in developing countries

Following are the 10 first principles presented in the FP document. We'll go deeper into each one over the course of the next couple of weeks. 

First principles: ICT in education

• Principle 1: Use ICT to achieve education and development goals.
  (What's are alternatives? Using ICT to build basic technology skills might be one.) 
• Principle 2: Use ICT to enhance student knowledge and skills.
  (Again, the IT curriculum is the bete noire that gives rise to this principle.) 
• Principle 3: Use ICT to support data-driven decision making.
  (In a lot of countries, it's a challenge to figure out what's going on in schools. Without that knowledge, it's impossible to make effective decisions.) 
• Principle 4: Include all short- and longer-term costs in budget planning.
  (The unanticipated cost of diesel fuel for an electrical generator shut down a school computer lab. So can the cost of a few new power supplies or monitors.)  
• Principle 5: Explore technology alternatives to find appropriate solutions.
  (Netbooks and 3G Internet, solar panels, thin-client networks, smart phones, SMS-to-web—private-sector and civil-society organizations have developed a panoply of new tools that are potential game-changers for developing-country schools.)  
• Principle 6: Focus on teacher development, training, and ongoing support.
  (Seems like a no-brainer? The challenge of getting effective training to teachers across a school system to help them use new tools to engage students is easy to underestimate.)
• Principle 7: Explore and coordinate involvement of many different stakeholders.
  (What are the pitfalls with partners? They might, for example, offer low-cost "one-size-fits-all" solutions that don't necessarily address critical problems the project. Or they might deliver computers to schools at private-sector speed while teacher training moves at the speed of state.)
• Principle 8: Develop a supportive policy environment.
  (A policy that says all kids should have ICT skills, well, that isn't supportive of anything interesting. Of course, the real impact of policy, sound or foolish, gets refracted through the other layers—everything from partners' contributions to power-grid failures to poorly refurbished computers.)  
• Principle 9: Integrate monitoring and evaluation into project planning.
  ("Integrate" in this instance means not only budgeting [key!] but crafting meaningful goals and objectives that can support measurable indicators of impact. Integrate.)
• Principle 10: “It takes capacity to build capacity”—System strengthening precedes system transformation.
  (A tad hieratic, this principle. Whazzit mean? Don't run before you can walk, don't commit to a massively scaled effort to produce 21st-century skills when teachers don't know their subjects or when only a handful of students complete high school. [Credit to education researcher Thomas Hatch for infecting me with a phrase that people don't understand all that easily.]

That's the bunch of them. Next up might be a quick review of USAID's current education strategy to see how well these principles—developed for USAID education officers—match up to the agency's current goals.