My interest in actually understanding effective integration of techno pedagogy in teaching learning made me design a pre test and a post test on "rotation and revolution" a topic taught in grade 6 and which is much used and abused due to lack of clarity on fundamentals on the part of the teachers leading to extremely confused students. In fact in one of my recent field trips an HM who has been teaching the topic for close to a decade admitted in front of everyone that he cannot answer the questions raised by me and my team members on the topic and thereby clarify the hard spots and requested for help. In fact we explained the students and the teachers present through activities and animations and questioned the students after that to check whether they have understood. The results were encouraging.
There are a number of hard spots in this topic and the most difficult part is the internalization of rotation, revolution and inclination of earth's axis at one go and it's effects. Tests were conducted for students of grade 7. We did have a control group and an experimental group and compared the scores.
In one of the schools in Berhampur the tests show a marked difference and students who scored zero in pre test have scored 12 which happens to be the minimum score, in the post test and a number of them have scored very high marks. The reasons for this are mentioned below:
1. We had a resource group meeting for geography teachers the day before, exclusively focused on this topic and I was present in the meeting. The meeting started with a PPT titled insights which mentioned the hard spots in this topic and the reasons for them being so.
2. Some excellent animations were shown and hard spots analysed and explained. The teachers were very interested and said that they had never thought that this topic can be so interestingly dissected to understand each and every hard spot through corresponding animations.
The same test was done in a school in Cuttack and I was again present. The only difference being that although animations were given to the teacher handling the experimental group and she went through the same the marks did not show much of a difference when compared with the control group. The reasons can be stated as follows:
1. The teacher did not get sufficient time to go through the animations and understand the same. She spent about 30-45 minutes in going through the animations before the session.
2. As a consequence there was not proper planning and sequencing of the transaction process.
3. Some of the animations used in the resource group meeting in Berhampur were not shown.
Conclusion:
While it is good to train and provide teachers with all the support the teacher needs to focus on the content and plan out the transaction process. Too much of information unless internalized leads to confusion rather than clarity. It distracts rather than focuses. Our brains are designed to focus on a limited number of things at one time. This proves that technology unless properly handled leads to a situation that is worse off rather than better off.
In the latter case although the teacher had been teaching the topic for a long time close to 5 years almost, still providing her with information on the hard spots lead to a worse off situation as she was distracted due to the information overload and could not give much time to focus.
Based on our experience this far we are now planning resource group meetings on specific subject areas focused on specific topics with a thorough preparation on the same by the team members
