Paperless Classrooms!!!

Post-pandemic period gives us an opportunity to reimagine what schools and schooling are for and advocate for a re-schooled society in which our investment in schools builds and develops society. Today’s learners are digital natives. They are accustomed to getting information and meeting their needs with a click of a button in a user-friendly, personal and customizable way. Students want their learning experience to meet their interests, time constraints, and academic needs. 

Learners are even more technologically savvy, demanding, confident, and focused. Contrary to the old-school traditions housed in English, math, social studies, and science, we’ll need to redesign curricula and courses to reflect the skills mandated by emerging economies and technologies. Skills such as coding, design, sustainability, and financial literacy will have to be integrated and taught in the classroom.

Schools will have to offer more ways for students to gain real-world experience that is applicable to their future careers. Schools should provide opportunities for students and include internship programs in companies. Rather than limiting students inside a classroom, schools can create more opportunities for students to gain useful technical skills through real-world application.

The world has already witnessed that the concept of 9-5 jobs in the office is also decreasing as people get an enormous scope for earning by sitting at their home and working online. As the world has witnessed a lot of technological changes, many things have changed since then. Email has replaced letters and WhatsApp and Facebook have almost substituted human interaction.

Blended learning, flipped classrooms, and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) for learning. Personalised learning at one's own pace and speed. And the teacher would now be the mentor, clarifier, and problem-solving specialist. Examination patterns will change completely with the increased use of online quizzes, group projects, and group discussions. It’s not very far when we will see students from all over the world attending the same classes, and interacting with each other. No one will have to miss out on an education, and students are much more likely to enjoy learning as a result.

At the rate at which technology is progressing Students entering school today will find themselves two decades from now in occupations that do not exist today. We had never imagined Flipkart, Amazon, Uber, swiggy, or even Google or Facebook two decades back. Coding today is catching fire! Anyone nowadays can learn to code and in the future create his/her own website or even his/her own business. Educational institutions must not only focus on their day-to-day operations but also shape their vision on how they will better use technology for enhancing the learning process. Today’s students have an entirely different world view to previous generations, having grown up in a world full of choice and limitless options. They have high expectations, demanding fast, easy access to content wherever they are. 

Gamification has added a more creative, dynamic, and innovative element to learning. These activities have the potential to turn an otherwise routine teaching-learning process into an imaginative activity that will motivate students to work harder and provide teachers with valuable insight into student performance. Video-sharing websites, such as YouTube, also offer an array of educational videos which students are relying on for doubt solving and learning. 

Students of today need deeper cognitive skills in priority areas such as creativity and problem solving, and social-emotional skills such as relationship building, self-awareness, and self-recognition since they not only support academic learning

but also promote well-being. To meet these needs, technology can play an increasingly critical, role in how students learn

and how educators support them.

In a country like India with such a huge population even if teachers and schools believe in the power of personalized learning and are motivated to individualize instruction, it is not always clear how to do so for hundreds or thousands of students. One-on-one mentoring is a highly effective way to personalize learning, for instance, but it is not feasible for working with large student populations when the focus is more on time-bound syllabus completion and assessments. Instead, schools can rely on systems that are technology-enabled and student-driven, which is a very powerful way to provide personalized learning on a large scale.

In today’s times, we don’t use technology, we love technology. If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it. It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. 

No matter how advanced technologies are, teachers are still the best educators !!!