Nursery, primary schools go digital, to do away with books

A six-year-old child walking into the classroom with a tab in his hands is no more a strange sight in schools. Digital learning is the latest trend in pre-primary and primary schools in Bengaluru. Even as schools experiment with innovative approaches to teaching and learning, students become familiar with technology as early as in kindergarten and lower primary classes. "It’s colourful and interactive. Kids love it,” said Shyamala Ramesh, Principal of Apple Kids International Pre-school, Vijayanagar. In this school, children studying in the LKG and the UKG are familiarised with smart board learning. In pre-school, they get to watch videos of rhymes, etc on the smart board. In kindergarten, they can touch and learn. Learning to identify colours, numbers or the alphabet on the smart board contributes to joyful learning, she added. Several organisations are exclusively working for developing digital learning material. More and more schools are subscribing to the software in order to improve teaching as well as learning quality. At Sri Chaitanya Techno School, for instance, lower primary students are already familiar with the functions of a Tablet. Tasneem Khan, the principal of the school’s Basavanagudi branch, explained that the institution had begun with classes 3, 4 and 5, and would extend the facility to higher classes later. Students of these classes will have to buy Tablets for integrated digital learning. The school follows the CBSE curriculum and the learning material on the Tabs will be the same as in textbooks, but more interactive. There will be video clippings attached to a lesson to make concepts easier to understand. "In the textbooks, the images do not move. Moving images in the digital format attract students towards learning the concepts,” the principal noted. Not just in the classroom, their homework too would involve working on puzzles, riddles and exercises on the Tabs. So much so that a child carrying a heavy bag full of textbooks and workbooks may be a thing of the past as schools are striving to reduce the dependence on hard copies of textbooks. Source: Deccan Herald