With the usage, most of the teachers overcame the fear and hesitation, and used tools effectively says Preetee Kumar, MD, Solan Public School, Solan, Himachal Pradesh in a conversation with Elets News Network (ENN).
History of Solan Public School and how it is different from other schools ?
Solan Public School does everything incapacity to give children the right foundation and a head start by instilling the right values in children and transforming them into lifelong learners. By exposing students to Arts, Sports and co-curricular activities, we inculcate life skills, critical thinking and intellectual curiosity within them. Solan Public School has extended the world-class infrastructure facility to the students.
How Solan Public School has handled the COVID crisis?
Solan Public School has taken many adequate measures to handle the Covid-19. The curb the spread of the virus, the school was closed when the lockdown was announced. It followed the Govt’s directives and protocol. All teachers worked from home and conducted teaching through online mode and still continuing the hard work. Periodic maintenance, horticulture, etc was being done by limited staff. All salaries of staff are dispersed through online mode.
According to a survey, only 8 pc school students in India have computers with net link, how has the school handled the crisis, especially in rural areas?
We had no such problem as Solan is a well-developed Town with wifi and net links and all the students has the necessary infrastructure at home too. With Digital India in the boom, there is good internet connectivity in the city.
Merely moving classrooms online would not mean effective remote learning. One-to-one interactions among peers and teachers are very important for learning, how will the school tackle the crisis post Covid?
The school took lessons for students through many online modes, one of them being through the ZOOM App. Since the App has all the features of video, text , and PPT along with the teachers’ and students’ screen presence, hence it was the best mode of knowledge transfer. There were also other modes where the homework and students’ responses were corrected by the teachers through projects on a daily basis.
Alongside teaching, teachers are also mentored for honing their skills using online tools, through webinars, micro-teaching sessions, which was a compulsory part of their routine work throughout the day.
How will the school tackle ailing disparity in the virtual world could translate into widening educational inequalities among learners?
The old clique “necessity is the mother of inventions”. Before the COVID lockdown, one never imagined that technology would become the single largest tool to disseminate education. Many teachers were not familiar with it, but then it became necessary and hence it was made a compulsory part of the life for effective communication. With the usage, most of the teachers overcame the fear and hesitation and used tools effectively.
In a similar manner, there will be other avenues opened up as we cross each day, to tackle this new post COVID scenario. Truly speaking, we have to live with Coronavirus and carry on just the way we could move on with HIV or other dreadful diseases, whose cure is still pending. Nature will find its way and we will learn new and better ways of coping with the present scenario. We need to be positive and hopeful.
