Teaching is the most respectful career of all and requires a lot of strength physically as well as mentally. It would not be hype to mention, “one can not be made a teacher; one is born as a teacher.” The incoming of this pandemic and lockdown situation, the ancient and traditional education and teaching models could not be practiced, so this accelerated the online mode of teaching.
Today in India, students all across the country are learning online and giving exams online. At this age of the 21st century, we have the technology by our side. Imagine this kind of crisis in the late 18th or 19th century when technology was not so advanced. Today when the physical world is shut, the world is being carry-forwarded online; every task is being completed online from shopping to ears, to teaching to learning.
Working with these advanced technologies is not everyone’s cup of tea, but this is the need of the era, and everyone, whether it is the student or the teacher, is adjusting to managing their job within this virtual screen. Teaching is entirely different here than in actual classrooms, as classroom teaching was much easier and less complicated.
Some Effective Suggestions
Use of Platform:
The platform you choose must be the best for you, easy to use, and more featured. To make the best use of the online teaching platform, you must first learn its features, its tools, and its accessibility, if not as an expert at least as of your need. The various applications where student-teacher meeting rooms are created provide a proper set of whiteboards, sheets, pens, screen sharing, and other management tools to organize a class systematically. You can also restrict the students’ access during the meeting so that there is the least nuisance conductance.
Pre-preparation:
Like in offline teaching here, you also need to make your topic list discussed the next day. You can use a book pdf to teach, or you can prepare your notes pdf. Also, you can make a presentation for your students. Online teaching is easier to create fun and enjoyable as you can use audiovisual graphics, videos, images, facts, charts, data, and everything. A reasonable sum of a collection of information is always helpful in teaching and answering student doubts.
Interaction:
Due to the complications teachers face during online lectures, they forget to make the class engaging and interactive. In any teaching or learning process, it is essential to conduct two-way communication. Teachers are suggested to increase student participation and involve them in the communication using basic life examples, questions, asking suggestions, raising queries, etc. As it is noticed that during offline classes, students do not participate due to lack of confidence or fear of being judged, similar happens in the online class. The difference is that you can observe the student through body language in a physical class, which is impossible in a virtual class. Therefore the teacher must push their students to participate.
Expected explanation:
Online teaching is indeed restricted with teaching tools and expressions, while in offline class teacher is free to perform any activity or perform any experiment to teach its students. So this is a significant problem for teachers, but it doesn’t give any liability to the teachers to cut off the lecture topics or run through the teaching process. Being a teacher, you are professionally trained to find solutions and provide answers to the students, hence use your knowledge and creativity to find solutions to every emerging situation. Cutting the topic or skipping the topic will create several loopholes and raise more doubts for the students making it hard to understand and study.
Revision:
Add tutorial lectures or revision classes for the students who could not attend the class due to network issues or any other matters every week. This will also give a platform for students to raise their doubts that they couldn’t manage to ask during the lecture duration as it is limited, and students have to prepare for the next lecture as well. Organizing a revision class will help students revise the topics and understand better.
Periodic Assessments / Assignments:
To make students indulge in the learning process, you must provide them assessments and assignments. This will make them revise their topics and research about the topic that can help in increasing the interest and involvement with the subject. The scoring and marking achieved from the assessment make them competitive and encourages them to work hard. Along with it, assessments and assignments are the only physical link between the books and the students. Therefore, while working for it, they can prepare their hand-written well-researched notes.
Also read: How to make online class interesting
