Teacher workshop- Integration of technical tools in the e-classroom

“Teachers need to integrate technology seamlessly into the curriculum instead of viewing it as an add-on, an afterthought, or an event.”  Heidi-Hayes Jacobs

A workshop is a great way for teachers to enhance their knowledge and skills in order to best undertake active and interactive learning for students.  The move from a traditional classroom to interactive online learning can be well facilitated with new technologies. In this regard, a series of interactive webinars on modern technology tools were held for teachers from 26- 29 June 2020. The resource person was Ms. Sonia Wadhwa, IT Manager and HOD ICT at The Sanskaar Valley School in Bhopal.

The first webinar on 26 June 2020 was on ‘Nearpod’- a student engagement platform to make teaching with technology easy and to enable students to take ownership, as it were, of their learning rather than simply passively viewing a teacher-directed presentation. Ms. Wadhwa guided teachers to navigate through the application and its tools and also demonstrated step-by-step on how to compose a lesson to promote independent learning amongst students.
 
In continuation, the objective of the workshop held on 27 June 2020 was to help teachers learn to conduct online assessments. The resource person demonstrated the steps of conducting formative and summative assessments online by using the website www.exam.net.

In the ongoing series of webinars, Ms. Wadhwa talked about an interesting online platform- ‘Wakelet’ in her session on 28 June, 2020. It is a content curation platform where teachers and students can store links, social media posts, videos and images as items. These items can then be organised as meaningful collections on the platform, which allows adding notes, images, videos and PDFs. 

The last session was held on 29 June 2020. Here the teachers were shown Flipgard- a platform that engages and empowers the voice in a classroom by recording and sharing short videos.

These platforms are especially useful during these times of virtual classes where teachers are reliant on online tools to educate their students. Technology will thus make the online teaching experience much more robust as the features of the platform will greatly minimise the handwork that the teachers otherwise need to do.

The session concluded with a doubt- clearing session where teachers got a chance to clarify their queries for an in-depth and clear understanding of the tools.