Anjuli Bhargava: One step towards a better world

Technology use in education highlights many cases of how a motivated teacher can make a difference

Students of Class 4-8 in a government school in Bengaluru recently went on a field trip to New York. They watched a video made by The New York Times called “The Displaced”, a film about refugee children from Ukraine, Sudan and Syria. They watched food packets being dropped from planes and the children scrambling for them. For a while the children were immersed in the travails and lives of the refugee children and could identify with them.
 
You may well ask who sponsored this trip as something like this would have been prohibitively expensive and far out of reach of these students, but all this was made possible thanks to their teacher Mohammed Fazil. Without physically taking the students anywhere, he managed to transport them. Using a whole range of innovative technologies — augmented reality, virtual reality with Google Cardboard and the Google Expeditions app — Fazil has discovered ways of taking his students — most of whom have never stepped out of their community — to the Taj Mahal, to various national parks and on underwater exhibitions. He uses a Microsoft Kinect controller to get the students to play motion sensing math games like Jumpido.

 
Fazil says using technology like this has helped in more ways than one could imagine. Teaching in English to Kannada-medium students was a challenge but the use of technology has helped them understand things visually and they have begun to pick up words in English and add to their vocabulary. Student participation has gone up as they love getting their hands on an iPad or the Google Cardboard viewer. Above all, a new — and otherwise inaccessible — world has opened up before them, making them more curious and engaged. Students don’t have that initial fear of technology anymore and are getting quite adept at using it. Lessons are far more exciting — Fazil’s primary goal.

 

In Bihar’s Rohtas district, Deepak Kumar Choudhary teaches English to grades 9 and 10 students at a local government school. Without getting into anything very complicated, he uses a pen camera to record all his lessons. Why? He shows the videos to the students in the next class, points out their mistakes and corrects their pronunciation. But even better, he manages to catch and correct his own mistakes: to assess his pace, his own pronunciation (if the teacher says it wrong, how will the children say it right?), whether his instructions were clear or not, did he spend too much time talking — like many teachers tend to do.

 
Initially, Choudhary found some resistance to the idea of recording the lessons — some children, especially girls, stopped coming to the classes fearing he would play these recordings to the principal or their parents to their disadvantage; some children felt conscious and stopped responding in their normal fashion once the camera was switched on.
 
But in due course, when the students realised what Choudhary’s motivation was and how it could help them the resistance came down and now they are excited to watch the videos and catch their own mistakes. It helped the students improve their pronunciation because for the first time they could actually hear themselves.

 
These are just two examples captured in a recent report produced by the Central Square Foundation in collaboration with the British Council on how innovative use of technology in India is improving learning outcomes and making studying and teaching more “exciting” — a word we usually don’t associate with the Indian education system.
 
What is heartening to see is that such examples have been found across the country and are not limited to the more progressive states. The report highlights 26 cases (out of 438 total submissions) that are spread across the country — from Nagaland in the east to some backward districts in Andhra Pradesh in the south to Gujarat in the west and Uttarakhand in the north. Neither are they limited to institutions with private students from high-income families. In fact the two examples illustrated above are both government schools with low-income parent communities.

 
It’s also delightful to see that many of the innovations come at very little cost and are in many cases at the behest of the teachers themselves. Highly motivated and usually tech-savvy teachers and school leaders have created their own “micro-innovations” at little or no cost to the students, the school authorities or the state government. Such teachers are trying to motivate and galvanise their peers to adopt some of these innovations with the firm belief that one book, one pen, one child and one teacher can change the world.