If you think that education in rural India is still lagging behind in technological advancements, this teacher in Maharashtra will prove you wrong.
Ajay Kale, who teaches in the Dahiwadi Zilla Parishad school in Sangli uses QR codes to teach his students!
Speaking to Pune Mirror about how he came up with this idea, Kale says, ” It is crucial to engage students in interesting activities. While many kids are hooked on to mobile phones and usually end up watching bizarre content online, this QR code will help them gain knowledge by getting direct access to additional information.”
So, while Kale teaches lessons using textbooks, he also records these lessons and puts them up on YouTube so that students can go back to the classes whenever they have a doubt.
Furthermore, Kale develops a QR code for every lesson and links it to further information about its theory, author or formulae.
Speaking to The Better India, he said, “I saw that the kids were always interested in watching videos and that seemed like a great idea to get them interested in the concepts of mathematics and Marathi poetry. I decided to take up the challenge and learnt online how to develop QR codes. Once I got confident about developing them, I scanned through several YouTube videos, edited relevant parts and joined them together in one tutorial video. This was linked to the QR codes that I printed and stuck on class VI textbooks.”
When the pilot project started with the class VI students of his school, Kale had used a Marathi textbook to see if students understood and took to his methods. He collected the works of the authors that featured in his textbook and made an archive of it. Linking the archives to the QR code, the students now had access to hundreds of poems and stories for whenever they wished to read those.
“Many students do not understand certain concepts and mathematical problems in one go.
Such students can revisit what is taught in class by simply scanning the code and watching the videos,” he told Hindustan Times.
“My friend, ND Patil, who also teaches in the same school suggested we take the initiative one step ahead. We started recording our own videos and embedding them with the codes. So now, as he features in the videos that I shoot, we link them back to our codes and upload the videos on YouTube,” Kale told TBI.
The digital world has made children naturally tech-savvy. Searching for videos on YouTube, or scanning QR codes is not alien to them. Kale ensured that they use this engrossment with the online world to good use.
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And his students are hopping onto these teaching methods enthusiastically! Gauri Bhisale, a class VII student, told PM, “Now, we have started developing codes, too. Our teacher taught us how to make them when we were in Class VI. A lot of research is involved before preparing each video.”
Such innovative techniques have earned Kale accolades from the Maharashtra state government and the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). The NCERT has requested him to present a report on the implementation and progress of his project on September 27, and this might make him eligible for a national award in the future.
(Edited by Gayatri Mishra)
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