How can open and distance learning and information and communications technology (ICT) provide us with more - and better - teachers?
Open and distance learning is increasingly used in teacher education in developing and developed countries. It has the potential to strengthen and expand the teaching profession of the twenty-first century and to help achieve the target of education for all by 2015. Teacher Education Through Open and Distance Learning examines the case for using open and distance learning and ICT to train our educators. It describes and analyses the ways in which these methods and technologies are used for:
*initial teacher training and continuing professional development
*training principals and school managers
*training those who provide non-formal adult and community education
*communities of practice and sharing of knowledge and ideas within the teaching profession
It also discusses the policy-making, management, technology, costing, evaluation and quality assurance aspects of this work. The contributors are outstanding practitioners in the field. The first review in over a decade, Teacher Education Through Open and Distance Learning draws on wide-ranging and international experience to summarise the strengths and weaknesses of new approaches to the education of teachers. It offers invaluable guidance to policymakers, planners, headteachers and teachers.

Bernadette was just ten years old when her father packed her off to a convent school in Dublin. Seven gruelling years later, she returned home to Liverpool at the start of the swinging sixties. Bernadette had dreamed of being a teacher ever since she was a little girl, so she promptly began a course at teacher training college, determined to give children the sort of education she wished she'd had. Bernadette got her first job at 21, teaching five to seven year olds in a school in one of Liverpool's toughest slum areas. The poverty and deprivation she saw at the school shocked her to the core. Children would frequently turn up shoeless and starving, but gradually Bernadette could see she was making a real difference in their lives, and found that teaching changed her own life in ways she hadn't expected. Rich in period detail, "Please, Miss" is an uplifting and moving book that opens a window onto the colorful and fascinating world of 1960s Liverpool.