I ask you a mathematical question but you are unable to answer it. And then I tell you that this question can ideally be answered by a student in grade 5. How would you feel?
Suppose, you are unable to read out a word or a sentence. What if I tell you that this ideally could have been read by a kid in grade 2?
Unfortunately, that’s a situation millions of students in our government schools go through every year. Historical learning gaps exist and they continue to remain the biggest challenge that everyone in the education ecosystem is trying to solve.
While the urban rural digital divide is still very wide in our country, the access to digital devices like mobile and tablets are on the rise. We need to find solutions where children find the freedom to learn, ask doubts repeatedly and develop a sense of proactiveness.
The students should feel excited to use digital devices and happily engage in learning with no one to make opinions about them.
iDream Education is one such organisation which through its finer innovation around educational tablets and Tablet based ICT lab for govt schools is striving to break open all barriers to regular usage and student engagement at home and in school. The organisation is focussed on designing solutions that are smart and super convenient to be used on a daily basis.
Uniqueness about their learning tablets
For starters, the entire display, buttons and navigation instructions on the learning platform are in local languages. So when a kid in rural Tamil Nadu opens a tablet, he/she sees everything in Tamil. That’s like a friendly handshake with the child.
A quick glance at the features of the tablets:
Access to Junior classes content
These tablets are designed in such a way that students can very easily go back to previous or junior classes content whenever they feel like. If a class 6 student feels that he/she would like to refer to a 3rd standard content for better understanding of his/her current syllabus, he/she would conveniently be able to do it.
Multiple categories of Digital Content
Animated video lessons, projects, digital books, assessments are all provided in a single view. Students can choose to learn as per their interest and create learning paths unique to them. For example, a child can do practice ortake tests again and again till he/she masters a particular topic. When you empower a child in such a way, they feel positive towards the idea of learning.
No internet needed
Since the entire content is pre-loaded on an SD card, there is no dependency on the internet. Students can indulge in learning whenever and wherever they feel like.
Non-judgemental environment for a child
Imagine how stress-free it is for a child if he is able to study or refer to any class’s syllabus whenever he feels like even at home. Thus, they:
- Revise lessons at their own comfort.
- Nobody checking upon their level or speed
- Students can develop their own learning path with absolute freedom.
Centralised Reporting
Teachers get a great deal of support when they can keep a track of each and every student. When students use these learning tablets and take up those assessment tests, teachers receive instant feedback and usage reports are saved on an online dashboard. Teachers can view this anytime they want and carefully gauge the progress paths of each student. Once teachers understand the learning level and the pattern of each of their students, they can then guide them with personalised lessons and tasks.
When Corona lockdown was first announced, the need for government school students to have an in-home learning supplement became a very immediate need. iDream Education also launched a mobile app called the iDream Learning App to fulfil this need. This is a free app that runs on all android smartphones and gives students access to local language content as per state boards.
However, as our country is gradually opening up, the demand for offline learning tablets is definitely going to go up. In the days to come, a lot of money is going to be spent on edtech to ensure that students have access to their personalised devices with offline digital content.
Nevertheless, it is critical to make sure that the student proactively picks up the device everyday and continues learning even when there is no teacher watching him/her. Understanding the child’s psychology, finer innovation in designing the learning platform, content structure and how reports are captured and made available to the teacher will play a very important role.
iDream Education’s learning tablets are certainly serving the purpose.
The bottom line is to ensure thatevery child is interested and excited about learning. Hence, the medium should be such that it arouses the curiosity of the child in a manner that he engages himself all on his own on a continuous basis with minimal deviation.
To know more about the solutions put together by iDream Education, please log onto: https://www.idreameducation.org/learningtablets
(Views are personal)
