The whole process of online classroom teaching required a lot of forethought and had to be initiated to facilitate learning for our students, ensure their safety during these exceedingly challenging times and simultaneously make sure that there is no lockdown in ‘teaching – learning’ process says Meenakshi Zarabi, Principal, ASPAM Scottish School, Noida in a conversation with Elets News Network (ENN).
“Online learning is rapidly becoming one of the most cost-effective ways to educate the world’s rapidly expanding workforce.”
Not many of us envisioned such momentous transferal in the teaching –learning process, i.e. from real classroom scenario to virtual classrooms and adopt and adapt to the non-traditional yet innovative way of teaching by incorporating technology into learning. This technology is now seamlessly integrated into our curriculum and should be viewed as an add-on and not as an after thought.
The whole process of online classroom teaching required a lot of forethought and had to be initiated to facilitate learning for our students, ensure their safety during these exceedingly challenging times and simultaneously make sure that there is no lockdown in ‘teaching – learning’ process.
Also read: Teaching Aids for Combating Lockdown of COVID-19 in India
Thus started demo conferences with teachers where they were trained by the school’s IT team on the usage and integration of online tools with teaching along with sessions with parents and students to equip them with the basics of attending the cybernetic classes. The students were also trained on prescribed netiquettes such as:
• Hand raise
• Unmuting the mikes
• Turning on the video
• Turn taking
Usage of various online tools like padlet, quizzes, screen sharing with power point presentations and audio-visual aids, demonstrations, whiteboard teaching, discussions has ensured maximization of student participation in the learning process. Thus, these online tools have supported in mapping students’ learning outcomes to their actual achievements by the way of differentiation, plenary and feedback in the form of assessment for and assessment of learning and thereafter devise methods to fill in the learning gaps. Extended learning tasks and assignments further help the students to reinforce their concepts.
We have also initiated online teachers’ observation as peer and collaborative observations yield its greatest benefits of sharing instructional techniques and ideologies between and among teachers with high quality feedback and support tools to enable them to improve their online instructional practices and facilitate students’ academic success in particular.
An online Parent teacher meet was also organized to enable interaction between parents and teachers for implementation of remedial and diagnostic recommendations. Periodic assessments and Interventions are also undertaken to assess students’ learning accomplishments.
Thus the present online sessions besides enhancing academic attainments of the students will also inculcate in them self-restraint, netiquette, understanding and using the new technology with aplomb.
