Dev Nath Pathak
The ‘new normal’ virtual classrooms started off as wonderful opportunities to continue learning during the pandemic, but with days turning into months the newness of online teaching is wearing off and opportunities are fast vanishing. By continuing to teach in our old ways we have lost the chance to embrace ‘newer’ ways of teaching.
Month: August 2020
Did we use the lockdown wisely?
Zamir Arif
Even as people are slowly beginning to wake up from forced lockdowns, with the pandemic not yet under control, schools continue to remain closed. But have we left our children to learn for themselves, used this as an opportunity to train them in self-dependency or give them lessons in empathy? Of course not. Unless we open the textbooks, give our students endless hours of homework and get them to fill up their notebooks we are not satisfied.
Recalling a forgotten tryst…
S. Mundayoor
Amidst all the clamour for online education to help us tide over the crisis that the pandemic has brought on, are we forgetting perhaps a lesser but far more omnipresent technology? Satellite television has a wider reach in this country and we have already experimented with educational tv content and hence know how to use it.
Online education, social justice and digital exclusion
Ambika Aiyadurai
As the clamour for online education grows louder, we are not listening to the voices coming from those groups of students who find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide. How do we mitigate their concerns and help them study too in this time?
My life now, in six words
Fareen Wahid
If you are wondering how to help your students understand what is happening around them, here is a simple exercise that this teacher gave her students to help them come to terms.
A teacher’s conundrum
Disha Jain
For most of us used to classroom teaching, going online is new and exciting. But in our desire to choose the best of the many available new tools are we forgetting the two most important things for every teacher? Our students and what we are teaching them.
And the job must go on
Shreya Jindal
With less than 24 hours to get on board a rescue flight taking her back home, here’s how a teacher kept her spirit is up and continued to teach while lugging around suitcases, waiting at the airport and during her quarantine period in the hotel.
The new normal through a parental lens
Ardra Balachandran
Teachers and students are both struggling and coping as they test waters with online learning, but what about the parents? What are their thoughts and how are they dealing with this work-from-home and learn-from-home situation?
Fostering students’ ownership of the school library
Dharamjeet Kumar
If a library is to become popular among its users, no matter how young, a bond has to form between the two. Facilitators of this school, on an island in Assam, involved their primary class students in setting-up the school library, formulating rules and deciding on activities for the library. In the process the young students ended up building an everlasting bond with their school library.
Salt pans – a human-made wetland of significance
Geetha Iyer
It is not always that human activity destroys nature. Once in a while, they also contribute to its biodiversity. Man-made salt pans not only produce a nutrient that humans most need to survive, but they have also become places for several birds and mirco-organisms to flourish. These habitats too are under threat and we need to conserve them.