Mumbai has emerged as the hotspot for the spread of the coronavirus. Hospitals are over-crowded and government schools have been turned into quarantine centres. Our schools too have been converted to quarantine facilities. This means our children will not be able to return to school for the next few months. But education cannot stop.
In light of the current situation, our teachers started conducting online classes for students of Standard IX since April 2020. However, with the start of the new academic year in June, we wish to extend online lessons to all children across our schools.
The teachers are working on creating lessons online and sharing it with the students through mediums such as Whatsapp and Google Classroom. However the biggest concern is that our families and teachers both have limited or no access to computers or laptops and smartphones would be the only possible device available to them.
Our focus would therefore be on creating a mechanism that will allow effective remote learning with the use of smartphones. We also need to provide our families with basic internet packs to sustain the online learning.
In a survey conducted by our social workers, it has come to light that almost 11% of our children do not have access to smartphones. Their parents use basic phones that do not have features of internet connectivity and option to download online applications. Further, our children live in small homes with a huge families. This may not allow the children a lot of quiet time to focus on their studies. Thus, we also need to provide some of the children earphones using which they are able to concentrate on their video lectures.
The lockdown has severely impacted the education of our children. We hope to keep their learning curve growing even during these difficult times.
