CBSE teacher workshop on Digitalisation

Taking from the belief that digitalising India is the way forward, the government is introducing a new infrastructure named DIKSHA. To empower the teacher community with this digital infrastructure, CBSE organised a capacity building workshop on 1 December 2018 at Ahlcon Public School- Creation and Curation for DIKSHA.

Teachers of various schools of Delhi attended the workshop. DIKSHA is a unique initiative which leverages existing, highly scalable and flexible digital infrastructure, while keeping teachers as its centre- focus. The plan was launched by Honourable Vice President of India, Shri. Venkaiah Naidu, on 5 September 2017 initially in Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, Punjab and Chandigarh. It is built to encompass the teacher, from the time student- teachers enroll in teacher training Institutes (TEIs) until and after they retire.

In India, many teachers create and use innovative tech-based solutions in their classrooms. Some state governments have also initiated programmes to support their teachers digitally. These initiatives inspired MHRD and NCTE to coordinate these efforts at a national level vide DIKSHA.

The workshop began with the presentation of a film made by the students of the host school to introduce the idea of digitalisation in various fields. This was followed by the auspicious ceremony of lighting of the lamp by Ms. Hasneet Kaur, CBSE resource person, Ms. Pallavi, Project Coordinator-DIKSHA, Mr. Dharmendra Goyal, Principal, Ahlcon Public School and Mr. Jagdish Prasad, Computer Science faculty, Ahlcon Public School.

Ms. Kaur began the session by telling us how teachers of various schools can create the digital content. She engaged us with the task of finding relevant domains in order to create the digital content. She shared the names of some Apps and websites which can cater to the demands of subjects while creating the relevant digital content. XMind for PPTs, Geogebra for Maths, Phet for Science and Timeline for History are there to name a few.

We were further informed, that, before creating content, teachers are required to do story boarding, which a step-wise technique. The next thing on the agenda of the workshop was a discussion on the curation of the created content. We were told that a team of teachers reviews and analyses all content before uploading. The points to keep in mind are that one should not be biased and evaluate the content keeping the student in mind. Evaluation of the content is done considering pedagogical and technical points. Ms. Kaur shared the rubrics of evaluation and also the online portals namely Open Shot and Audacity.

Teachers were involved in an activity where they were asked to evaluate and curate a video from any online website, imagining themselves to be a part of the curation team. It was told that the videos longer than 5 minutes would be rejected and not considered whereas in the second step the appropriateness of the content would be checked.

It was a very informative session and well conducted by the resource person.

Ms. Jigyasa Khokhar