Embracing digital teaching to become future-ready

Tirupati: The erstwhile Chittoor district is in the forefront of embracing digital technology based teaching methods much ahead of other districts in the state. Re-engineering of teaching skills assumed significance and became a necessity as the world has been witnessing transformation in all areas and particularly after the Covid pandemic. Further, one important aspect in the National Education Policy (NEP 2020) was promoting digital integration in teaching by coming out of monotonous methods.

In line with this, AP State Council of Science and Technology (APCOST) and department of school education, Chittoor have jointly taken up the digital education campaign by organising various programmes from time to time. Explaining the concept, the district coordinator for digital education P Neelakanta told The Hans India that under the digital age the teacher should have the skills and knowledge required for effective teaching and sufficient knowledge of the subject.

Traditional classrooms cannot satisfy the needs of education in the 21st century for long and the new classroom should be equipped with modern technology and teachers should be facilitators of the learning process. These 21st century skills broadly consist of 3 Ls – learning skills, life skills and literary skills.

He said that re-engineering allows greater control over interaction with students, greater ability to direct attention to individual needs and the ability to adapt modes appropriately to tasks. Instead of acquiring knowledge, how to acquire it and use it in day to day life is more important and lead the students towards creativity.

The department of education in the erstwhile Chittoor district has been organising several programmes to enhance life skills for the teachers. Neelakanta has completed five-day training from International school of Geneva in 2019 and got a better insight on the modern teaching methods across the world. In turn, the teachers and students are being trained on the modern skills which are essential in the 21st century curriculum.

The department has organised a training camp of key resource persons on life skills. An online programme to teach computer coding to students was held. Subsequently through APCOST the same programme was continued and trained 10 teachers from each district following which computer coding has been taught in several schools now.

A two-day workshop on digital content making was held to train teachers on various apps, power point, animations, etc., Neelakanta said that it helps to take up the forthcoming digital technology based teaching as at least two digital content making teachers will be readied in each school.