The Polyglot classroom

A classroom is a bunch of students with different cognitive capabilities and different learning styles. While some maybe auditory learners, others would be visual learners. Some may find activity based learning useful while others may find cognitive learning useful. So how do we find which student is what kind of learner and do we really have time to cover the same content through multiple learning mechanisms?

One simple way to check the styles of learning is to expose all the students to each of the style for a month and ask their preference at the end of month. While this may be heavily biased based on peer pressure or the content, can be the first step. Then observe if the students improve their learning outcomes and switch the student to a different group based on the outcomes and interactions.

The difficult part would be time management across different learning styles and finally converging them to be effective for the evaluation which is predominantly testing cognitive retention and theoretical understanding. Some ways to do that could be – simultaneous exercises to each group for the same content introduced with one particular style each day by the teacher. Home works and worksheets tailored to different styles, class evaluation and assignments tailored for each style, digital content suitable for different styles prepared beforehand.

Have you tried such approaches? What has been your experience?

The Pi in Raspberry

It was interesting to note that Raspberry Pi was put together with Education in mind. The purpose was for the students to use it as an affordable computer to learn computing. https://www.raspberrypi.org/

I would want to experiment with my class where I take the Pi connected with a bluetooth keyboard and monitor and take programming lessons. That would be really cool. But is it really feasible and sustainable for schools around to adopt to it. What I understand that although the purpose was for education, world over it has served as a great tool for hackers, experimenters and has entered as a standard component in the makers space.

My take is we should continue to experiment within education as Rs 2000 computer with a strong set of accessories powered by a power-bank should definitely make a difference in our classrooms. And very importantly apart from using it to experiment with computing, it can be used as a computing machine to demonstrate rich animations related to the textbook content, play educational games and also stream videos with a reliable hotspot connection. I do not think we have experimented this enough.

I am very bullish that if we make it work in one school/class and find a reliable and repeatable way to scale it up it can make a difference in the schools and way content is consumed in the classrooms. Will try and update this blog in some weeks !

Alexa bridge the Gap

I strongly believe that technology can be a great leveler for education. We all have seen it with Google and Wikipedia.

Now within our classrooms apart from powerpoint animations and some basic classroom management software I do not see much of new tech being used.

Let us see how voice technologies can be used in the classroom. There are already experiments underway on this within classrooms and colleges like you can see here https://edscoop.com/voice-command-technology-alexa-how-can-you-improve-teaching-and-learning/

We can have an echo device lab in the schools, the challenge would be to isolate the area of voice interactions. Maybe a teacher facilitated classroom version and group interaction with one device per table with time slots might work.

What can students do with it. When teacher is not around students can interact with the device about concepts and articles on their subject topics, they can ask math answers to check their approaches. There can be skills developed for quizzes on specific subjects.

There are a lot of possibilities . There are also concerns – developing an emotional attachment to the device by the smaller kids can become a problem, privacy concerns are always there but these were there when computers and tabs were introduced into the classrooms isn’t it ?

Animated Textbooks

With the technologies available today, kindle, gaming apps etc Harry Potter style live, animated textbooks and newspapers should not be far fetched. Maybe these are already used and not available to mass market yet.

Take for example the solar system, when the student reads about the solar system in today’s textbook he or she see’s an image like below

Source : Image Source

What if the textbook the student is reading has the following animation

Source: Image Source

How different it would be if instead of browser , the book you read has got such animations and as a further step can be made interactive and clickable ,zoomable etc. It would bring to life lot of abstract concepts which goes over the head in the class rooms. What do you think?