Teachers Community of Learning Bangalore South Block 3 Vidyagama program

As a result of the lock-down owing to Covid-19, schools are exploring ways of supporting student learning. Given that the situation is not a short term challenge and is likely to pose difficulties intermittently, it is necessary to evolve appropriate and flexible strategies to design learning possibilities for students, especially for students who may not receive much support at home. The flexible strategies will involve a combination of online sessions with offline activities, project-based learning, thematic learning, etc.

The TCOL program has aimed to support schools and teachers to integrate ICT in their teaching and this situation requires careful attention to possibilities of supporting learning, and the 2020-21 program will focus on this requirement.

Collection of information for planning teaching-learning
While schools will have basic information about their students and parents, collected during the admission process, to enable online education, more information needs to be collected covering - address, map location, number of devices at home, Internet connectivity on each device, availability of device with the student (if the device is owned by a parent who takes it to work, then it would be accessible to the student only in the morning or the evening), electricity supply situation, siblings and the grades they are studying in (since some of the offline activities can take support of parents and siblings), parent's educational status etc. See this sheet for an information template. Each school needs to create a similar document to plan its online and offline teaching efforts.

IVRS (Interactive Voice Recognition System) can provide the schools an easier way to collect most of this data without needing to call all parents repeatedly. The school can record a message with provides simple options to the receiver (parent) to provide answers to many of these questions by pressing the number pad in their phones (press 1 for 'have one device at home'). The responses would be automatically collected in a spreadsheet and can be used for micro-planning.

Familiarity and comfort with online learning platform
One line learning platforms have some features to support online teaching including - video conferencing, sharing screen (which has a presentation or a video or even a web page), digital white/black board, online chattigng etc. Student management functions like muting participants, locking participants, sharing presentation righss etc are also useful to learn.

BigBlueButton is a free and open-source online teaching platform. It can be used as a standalone platform to teach or can be integrated with the Moodle Learning Management System. The latter option is suitable for teacher training programs while the former is simpler and hence suitable for student teaching. BigBlueButton has the advantage that it does not require an app installation to use on the phone, a web address (URL) is sufficient.

Familiarity with BigBlueButton will require two sessions of a few hours each, the second to refresh learning and solve any doubts or issues. See BigBlueButton_Workshop page for a workshop plan to learn BigBlueButton

Creating appropriate lessons/content for online teaching
Online teaching is NOT the conversion of 'chalk and talk' into video recording of lectures, much more creativity is needed to make the learning an engaging activity. Students are unlikely to spend hours watching videos of teaching. Interactivity is even more necessary in online learning.

This means that lessons would need to be developed and digital versions created to be used in online teaching

Subject-specific content and pedagogy models for online teaching.
The TPCK (Technological-Pedagogical-Content Knowledge) framework can be used to support the planning of lessons that are engaging and facilitate student learning.

The approaches would need to have a subject-specialization, even as disciplinary boundaries will need to be transcended during this period. Hence these are discussed by subject - Mathematics, Kannada, English and Science.