It is interesting, the generations gone by all learned and learned their lessons well without having to take support of multi-sensory teaching methodologies. What has changed suddenly? Why this craze for digital learning experiences and why are schools (rather classrooms) at the centre of this storm? Not to mention that teachers are being made to upgrade their skills and become experts at technology usage rather than their own subject matters.
What has happened is a mix of a lot of things:
1. An increasing recognition and acceptance on part of the education community that childen learn differently and may be endowed with different kinds of intelligences. It is a well-accepted fact now that we tend to remember what we see more than just what we hear.
2. Plethora of choices available to the students, driving them to be more demanding in the classroom with respect to quality and variety of teaching methodologies
3. Govt. initiatives to upgrade infrastructure in schools and provide technology solutions, in turn raising the bar for private schools
At the heart of it is the plight of the teacher. They accept and agree that audio/visuals are a very important component of teaching-learning process and even more today than ever. But, that in turn, means that they need to start learning new methods of teaching, become masters of unfamiliar technology and deliver content alien to them to their students. This, in turn, drives most of the investments in technology in a school down the drain. What then is the solution to this?
In my mind we can solve this by the following 3 steps:
1. Enabling teachers to realize why audio/visual method of teaching is important. Although, they agree to it, since they never studied under this method, they are unaware of its learning impact. Getting them to realize the impact is the first step forward
2. Empowering them to own the content, by creating their own or customizing it. This can be achieved by various means, sharing, collaboration, simplifying the process of gathering and creating content and most importantly, giving them the breathing space to learn and improvise on their own – just like they did with their own notes or other teaching aids. Why should technology serve a teacher any different from the other teaching aids? It should make things easier, simpler and more effective, not the other way round.
3. Designing interesting classroom experiences around audio/visual content delivery. This can be in the form of activities, experiments and lot of interactivity in the classroom. This can help bring out the real-life learning scenarios for the students and hone their skills on application of facts/theory, team work, critical thinking and even presentation skills.
The kind of revolution that is possible in a classroom by using the right set of digital teaching aids is unparallelled and needs to be experienced. We see the magic being wielded on the children when a teacher uses RazorBee and it reinforces what we have learnt over the past few years.
If you like what you read and would like to keep in touch – you can write to us at sales@ariemtech.com and follow us on twitter at @ariemtech.
