Integrating Digital Story-Based Pedagogy in Language Education

The Department of State Educational Research and Training (DSERT), Karnataka in collaboration with IT for Change (ITfC) piloted the teacher professional development (TPD) program ‘Integrating Digital Story-Based Pedagogy in Language Education’ in the academic year (2023-24) for government higher primary school teachers. The program is being implemented in four Colleges of Teacher Education (CTEs) in Karnataka where Sri Aluru Venkata Rao Bhasha Labs are established – Mysuru, Chitradurga, Belagavi and Gulbarga. The program aims to equip language teachers with the necessary technology know-how for creating story-based digital resources, strengthen their abilities to effectively utilize digital resources for language teaching-learning through inclusive and innovative pedagogies, help teachers experience and internalize meaningful technology integration and set up teachers Communities of Practice (CoPs) that can promote peer learning and mentoring by providing opportunities for them to share experiences and ideas.

Year 1 of the program focused primarily on building capacities of teachers to create audio resources. As part of this process, two sets of workshops were conducted in the four CTEs with select cohorts of teachers. The first set of workshops focused on story narration and recording and the second set of workshops focused on editing the recorded stories using FOSS tools to enhance it with music and sound effects. Over 220 high-quality audio stories have been produced in Kannada, English, Urdu and Marathi which will be made available as Open Educational Resources (OER) on a repository to teachers across the state.

Teachers shared positive feedback appreciating the learning opportunities that the workshop provided in terms of immersively experiencing storytelling, understanding the audio production process and hands-on exposure to FOSS tools for audio editing. Teachers also shared that they saw value in the resources produced as they could imagine the possibility of taking it to their classrooms and the impact it can have on children’s langugage learning.

The next phase of the program will focus on techno-pedagogical aspects of integrating digital story-based resources in classroom teaching while continuing resource creation and extending it to other languages. The program is also proposed to be scaled up to all the districts of Karnataka through collaboration with DIETs, along with the CTEs