Digital Networking Going Postal and a Tale of Three Schools
نویسندگان
چکیده
For two months, Monica, an English teacher at the Kannar village school in the State of Uttar Pradesh had been receiving a video feed of recordings of live lessons given by some of the best teachers at a highly regarded urban school in the capital city of Lucknow, some 30 km away. During a routine monitoring visit by us in November of 2005, fully expecting to see Monica using the videos in front of the village children while she actively interacted with them as she was trained to, we were surprised to see that Monica had decided on her own initiative not to use the videos in front of the children at all. Instead, she had carefully studied the videos on her own ahead of the scheduled classes and took copious notes to the point that she could largely replicate what the videoed model teachers had been doing without actually playing the videos. We learned that the thrill of self-improvement was very much fueling Monica’s enthusiasm for learning both the subject matters as well as the teaching methodology. To us, the creators of a new project called the Digital StudyHall that aims to “network” the best urban schools with their surrounding village counterparts to improve rural education, Monica is a best-case scenario, as both children and teachers are gaining access and learning from the best teachers in a way that they could not have done before. In the remainder of this article, we briefly describe the twin pillars of the project that are behind Monica’s success story: the technology and the pedagogy. In many ways, this is not “yet another distance-learning project.” Technology-wise, a key principle is cost-realism through innovative use of what is available; and pedagogy-wise, the main principles are recognizing and working to bridge the gaps between schools of different backgrounds, and proactively involving people in the loop, instead of their being overshadowed by technology.
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تاریخ انتشار 2006