Y V PHANI RAJ / HYDERABAD
Today students are naturally keen to adopt technology as a tool for learning, research, communication and self-ex- pression, traditional ways of learning are getting lower and lower in practice. Flipped classroom, e-learning are the new trends in K-12 (primary and sec- ondary education), said, Sameer Buti, executive director and co-founder, Classteacher Learning Systems.
On cost being a barrier for schools for deploying learning tools, he said, “There are mixed response regarding being cost sensitive, some schools and institutions are and some not, we are supporting all kinds of needs coming from schools and most of institutions are most happy with what they are getting. And if we see, technology is getting cheaper with each passing day or month.”
As costs of smartphones and con- nectivity are coming down sharply, we see an exponential growth in all for- mats of mobile learning too. New tools such as digital white boards are gaining prominence. Digital white boards are used in the classroom for teaching, as- sessment and student monitoring. They support traditional teaching by bringing subject and pedagogical ex- pertise and data analytics to support teachers in the classrooms.
In the last 6-7 years, a lot of technol- ogy has gone into classrooms. We feel a lot more work needs to be done to em- power educators to use it to create more interactive learning experiences. “We also think that now technology needs to go into the hands of students so that they can play a more active role in ac- quiring knowledge. Our teams are doing pioneering work on game based learn- ing, simulations for learning and on
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personalisation,” Sameer Buti said.
“We use technology – interactive dis- play, tablets, smartphones, Internet to transform teaching and learning expe- riences at schools and homes. It has more than a decade of research into. emerging technologies and pedagogy in education and is a thought leader in in- novation in school education sector.”
He opined, “Technology is evolving by each day, and if you don’t evolve with it, you are going vanish from the mar- ket, so we have to upgrade and to main- tain our reputation as innovation leader in market, we are constantly working on new innovative ideas.”
K-12 is the basic segment of educa- tion, there would be no higher educa- tion if there is no strong base for K-12 education. India is the nation of youth, majority of population comes from the youth. So K-12 is highly important for the goal of educated India. If you see, only preschool market is worth more than one billion dollar, which is a short- est segment of education, and K-12 is the largest segment of education in India, where as the total education in-
dustry’s size is around $110 billion.
Speaking on trends, he said, “Trends are showing that in recent years K-12 is getting more investments than higher education in past couple of years and these trends are not limited to India. but coming from global levels.”
Schools are rapidly adopting tech- nology, to supplement their teaching- learning process. “Our most successful implementations are characterised by focus on teacher training, commitment of time and resources and a strong change management leadership in the school. Parents are very supportive of such a transformation. Schools shall take leadership in the years to come through a judicious implementation of technology. Today teachers are getting more accustomed to digital tools, we see them keen to explore more interac- tive resources and also seek to create their own resources with the lesson. building tools that we provide them.. Teachers are also experimenting with our tablet solution-classpad and trying out tools to further personalise educa- tion delivery.
