Technology and Education
What is digital education?
Digital education is the innovative use of digital tools and technologies during teaching and learning and is often referred to as Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) or e-Learning.
Source : University of Edinburgh website
Every coin has two sides. In the same way, I feel digital education also carries both, some benefits and some drawbacks.
We are dealing with a huge problem nowadays (Covid-19) and because of this, it has become really difficult to gather students in school. But, at the same time, it is also impossible to stop providing education to them. So in this scenario, using technology is the only way to continue imparting education. It carries many benefits:
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It involves parents’ role which is necessary for proper educational growth of a child.
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It also aids interaction with teachers individually, as well as in a group.
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It helps the students to search more information online and collect essential resources.
Despite having the benefits it also carries some drawbacks. As most of our Indian families have more than one child, it creates a great problem for teachers as well as parents to provide classes to both of them on time. The second problem deals with internet connection and speed. In most areas of our country and even in cities there is a huge problem with running the internet properly. It creates a great problem especially when students are attempting their online tests. It may also lead students to internet addiction. On behalf of online classes many a time students start watching online movies, playing online games, sometimes even chatting online with strangers.
Being a teacher myself, I use a strategy to make digital education more powerful. I would like to share with you all how I teach my students :
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I divide my whole class into small groups.
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After that these small groups are divided according to the different days in the week.
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This process helps me to connect with each student of the allotted group on a particular day. As in the end of class everyday, the allotted group participates in Viva and their performance helps me understand how much they have learned from that class.
And for students’ entertainment, every Saturday is a fun day. Every Saturday I share one of my favourite recipes which is according to my students’ demand. And I keep dance, art, singing activity according to their suggestions to avoid monotony.
These steps really help me build connections with my students individually. And this also helps my students to be more interested and alert towards their studies.
I suggest parents to monitor what students are looking at on the phone so that the fear of their parents can stop them from indulging in inappropriate practices. I also suggest parents to take care of the timetable of online classes so that they become aware of the timing when they should be allowed to use the phone.
It’s really a great challenge to design something which is both, interesting and beneficial for the future of our nation but as the word, ‘IMPOSSIBLE’ tells us itself that ‘I AM POSSIBLE’, I guess only by designing in a proper way we can give wings to our digital education.
Overall digital education is providing us a great platform for study but it should be taken care of by both teachers and parents so that it can provide only benefits to the students, not the drawbacks. I personally feel that both students and teachers should take this form of education more seriously.
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