Academic Intervention
Wall Magazine – A unique way to nourish Child Creativity
Schools are institutional spaces for communities of learners, including both students and teachers. How can we organize the environment in the school and classroom so that such interactions support and enhance both teaching and learning? How can the space of the school be nurtured as a context where children feel safe, happy and wanted, and which teachers find meaningful and professionally satisfying?
School Wall Magazine is one such initiative to promote the creativity of the students. Students learn to develop a medium to communicate their feelings in the form of art, mainly through stories and posters.
We identify a space near the school notice board for the wall magazine and then create an aesthetic look befitting with students’ creativity. Every month students come with their articles and posters and submit it to the student cultural committee. The committee selects the best among them and put it on the wall magazine where everyone can see it.
Interactive Learning with ICT
Harnessing Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) to enhance the quality of teaching and learning in Science, Mathematics, English, and the Arts is the principal objective of this initiative. In addition, it also aims to make web-based knowledge resources accessible to students and teachers. This direct access to multimedia equipment with the the internet has encouraged the students to mix and make their own products, to present their own experiences, and to explore their own creative imaginations. Extra emphasis on “Joyful Learning through e-Learning materials” has played an important role in creating interest in the children. It also helps in eliminating the fear of education from these first-generation children. A significant change is to ensure that the students are shown practical ways in which the theoretical aspects taught in their classes are implemented. For example, YouTube videos are shown related to their science topics. This has become quite helpful as students are easily able to relate the theory to practical applications. So it is not surprising to see the levels of comprehension have significantly gone up through the use of this method. The computer has been a boon for the children indirectly as it has also given them a reason to learn English as a part of the curriculum owing to the fact that most of these students’ first language is vernacular tribal language. Since the teachers of this school are also not quite fluent in English, we tried to immediately take this as an opportunity to teach English to students through videos. The result is that the English speaking and writing courses shown on YouTube have turned quite a bonus for them. We now show the videos and ensure that students repeat the word/sentence as enunciated by the speaker in the video.
In addition, the installation of the e-Learning Centre has been helpful for teachers in organizing their lessons in advance. They have been surfing for newer concepts and methods to be imparted in class. Gmail, social media, Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia are now common names in school. Teachers are now using Camtasia to make their own e-learning materials in Odiya and sharing it with other schools. Some of the teaching staff are now using e-commerce sites to purchase materials for the schools