Nadia School Develops e-Content For Study At Home 2013-09-25 16:18 BY SOVON CHAUDHURI Nagarukhra (Haringhata, Nadia), Sept. 25: At a time when personalized attention to each student has become nearly impossible by the teachers in schools, particularly where the numbers of students are high, a school in Nadia has developed a unique process to help them by providing them with the e-contents of the classes to study at home. 71-km away from Calcutta, the Dighalgram Netaji Vidyapith High School management, located under Haringhata block in Nadia, have introduced a pilot project from this season that can be termed as a sort of e-learning with difference, under which the students are being provided with the live recordings of their teachers’ class lectures as well as audio-video presentations of different subject chapters in “.3gp” or “.mp4” file format in micro SD card or in Compact disk so that they can watch and study at home playing the file on the mobile phone or on VCD. The school which was set up in 1966 has only 11 regular teachers against a sanctioned strength of 14 to teach 1250 students. Significant fact is that there is no other school located around 5-km radius area. In last year owing to dearth of teachers coupled with huge number of students, the school management compelled to install close circuit televisions (CCTV) and centrally audio address system in each of its 12 class rooms for better management of students and to monitor their activities. The system incurred an expenditure of Rs.3.75 lakhs of which SwapanNaskar, an assistant teacher donated Rs. 2-lakhs. Now continuing such endeavor the teachers responding to an appeal made by the managing committee of the school have now been working to develop audio visual contents of their subjects and storing them at the school’s data bank. The teachers are also working on a ‘interactive students response system” to assess the mental ability and qualitative development of students. Secretary of school committee Mokaddesh Mondal, a farmer by profession and a local Trinamul Congress leader said: “We have urged teachers to develop the contents to help the teachers. We are glad they have agreed to do it even without any extra payment for it”. Head Master of the school Santanu Mandal said: “We have also appealed eminent teachers in neighboring areas and individuals to develop similar contents and contribute to our data bank for sake of the poor students in the area”. In an area like Nagarukhra, where poverty sounds over the trumpets of development, and the a large section of the students belong to farming community and BPL class, the school authority decided to go ahead with the project only after it surprisingly found in a survey that nearly 95% of the students and their parents use multimedia enabled mobile phones and also 60 of them have VCD players at their homes. For the pilot project, school has chosen the class five which has 250 students, divided into two sections. Head Master Santanu Mandal and a team of eight teachers have been vigorously working on the project under the guidance of IT professional NilanjanNath, a friend to Mandal – the brain behind the project, who works as a manager at Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. To implement the project, the school authorities have formed a team of teachers of different subjects and have also arranged for live recording each of their lectures using some basic hardware like PC/Laptop, Pen Tab with capacitive pen and software like ‘Microsoft PowerPoint’ (for creating lecture slides), ‘Active presenter’ (for recording the pen strokes and voice of teachers) and ‘FreeMake’ (for converting the file into 3gp or mp4 format) so that the recorded clippings can be stored and used later by the students as well. The teachers have also been asked to develop audio visual presentation of their subject in power Point so that the students can be provided with the content in a compatible format of their choice for their use at home. Head master of the school Santanu Mandal said: “We have a very scanty strength of teachers in comparison to huge number of students. As a result it is very difficult to give personalized attention to each student. Moreover, each student has a different level of understanding based on their state of mind, attention on lecture and basic concept. To overcome this problem, we have been giving them the clippings of the class as well as video presentation of different topics as per their requirement”. “Another important reason that also led us to take such initiative is absence of a large number of students during the harvesting seasons. As the students of mostly belong to farming and labor community, they are forced to abstain school to keep their younger sibling at home as their parents become busy in paddy fields. Such absence even often led to drop out as they lag behind class and become afraid to overcome. They do not even financial capability to afford private tutor to complete the curriculum. So, now if any student misses class he can easily collect that particular video recording of the class from the school and watch it on his mobile”, the head master added. “We have tried to find a solution so that the missed classes do not become a burden to the students, rather it turns into a joyful learning”, he added. To materialize this concept the school has developed a digital library where the recorded clippings and the video files are being stored for the students. The students are mainly taking the required contents to the mobile phone which we transfer from our data bank through blue tooth device. Some students have been taking the contents in compact disk for viewing at home, said a teacher. Brain behind the project NilanjanNath said: “Our aim is to create content in an inexpensive way and to give it to the students in the easiest mode free of cost so that they can study, revise as many as times they require at their own pace of learning”. “As the school is located in a rural poor economic belt and most of the students are first generation learners, our aim is to develop such a process of learning that any individual without formal IT training can use it”, said Nath. “I belong to poor middle class family and learnt the importance of education. My objective is to help the poor students in the rural areas using some basic technology to get education to their reach”, Nath added. School secretary MokaddeshMondal said: “We have tried to find out a way to solve the problem of dearth of teacher. We have repeatedly appealed the government for posting of teachers, but they never responded. Now, we have introduced this system using our limited resources. We would appeal the district administration to come and visit our school and request them for financial help so that we could implement the project for other classes too”. How the system works and recording done? “Due to lack of fund we have so far able to develop only one digital class room equipped with big projector connected with PC, Pen Tab and capacitive pen. We have trained a team of teachers to handle these gadgets who give lectures using the pen tab to write their notes and instructions which reflected on the screen. The entire on screen reflection is recorded simultaneously along with the audio through ‘Active Presenter’ software”, said Mandal. After the lecture is completed, the lecture is saved and kept in data bank. “If any students require the lecture to go through it again, we advise them to bring their Micro SD card to get a copy of the recorded clipping”, he added. “In this we have been recording daily lectures of English, Bengali, History, Science and Geography subjects”, he said. Kakali Majumder, a teacher in English said: “This is a new experience of teaching. It is not only helping the students, rather helping us to rectify our mistakes and to develop quality of our lecture contents”.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 16:04:18 +0000
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