Right blend of traditional and digital learning in teacher education

Today, the education system worldwide is moving their classrooms from teacher-centric environmentto 21st century learning spaces where students are empowered, the classroom is flexible, and the focus is on creation, collaboration, and higher order thinking skills. Making education digital in schools has taken a boom in the field of formal education in India too. In Indian schools digital learning was launched in Dec. 2004 through the scheme ICT@ schools. One of the components of this scheme is capacity enhancement of all teachers in digital learning. Competency is not achieved by just reading material and viewing pages on a computer display but by providing many opportunities for human interaction through teacher-taught discussion, peer-to-peer exercises, discussion groups, and similar activities. This is now the most significant problem to analyse the right blend of traditional and digital learning in teacher education and needs attention of educationists, as it is the need of the hour. For the proposed study a secondary data based analytical research methodology is applied. The study concludes that Teachers remain crucial to learning. When students are actively engaged with digital tools and their teachers, it is most effective. So the teacher must be trained with both traditional theoretical way as well as digital practices. The need is to have a rightblend of traditional and digital learning in our teachers training too. Domination of theoretical training with a slowdown on digital learning would be a terrible idea in this digital era which is facing knowledge explosion worldwide. MHRD,NCTE and appropriate authorities should pay prime attention towards teachers training institutes and provide them all essential support to be competitive globally.