Reflections of My Pandemic Classroom

The COVID pandemic has prompted most teachers across the world to innovate and adapt to online formats, including myself.
Despite being an IT educator, in the initial days of pandemic, I wasn’t very comfortable handling the changed dynamics of teaching. Yes! I was well-acquainted with integration of technology in my lessons, but frankly I found it quite strenuous to replicate the essential elements of classroom teaching effectively in ‘virtual teaching’. I recall how I convinced myself to take up this two-fold challenge positively i.e. to figure out productive ways of humanizing the online classroom experience for my students and to upgrade myself in terms of pedagogical and communication tools.

For the first few weeks, I would feel a bit low in confidence and would spend hours visualizing and practicing my lectures for the next day, even for the topics that I’ve been teaching for a decade and a half. The struggle of tackling a patchy connectivity during a class would literally give me nightmares. But I was determined not to let my online interaction with students turn into a lame communication with a disembodied voice, so I started teaching them with a nice blend of firm yet friendly tonal quality.

Yet another challenge I faced during online teaching was to utilize available hardware and software resources to its best without lacking in dissemination of knowledge. And I felt proud of myself when I first synced two devices i.e a desktop (a laptop couldn't be provided by the institution where I work) for video and a phone for audio, for the first time to give a practical demonstration to my students. I felt so accomplished when students gladly expressed that they were enjoying learning with ‘remote practical sessions’. It reaffirmed my faith that using virtual tools can also make teaching a richly rewarding experience.

The process of my unlearning, relearning and upskilling didn’t end here. A few days back, I explored some new platforms to understand the process of developing a small mobile app (that was actually a part of curriculum in 8 standard). After achieving the desired outcome, I felt a great sense of contentment of trying my hand at something new.

On this journey of my professional upgradation, one of my newly developed interests has been to engage with Educational Platforms such as ‘Google for Education’ on social media platforms and insist them on bringing some favorable features for educational services offered by them to make teaching-learning more fruitful (and believe me, they really pay attention to ideas/suggestions of users and try incorporating the required features in the respective products).

Over the months, I’ve evolved to be more of a resourceful facilitator who is continuously researching and implementing ideas in my virtual classroom to make learning equally impactful for students as it was in a traditional in-person environment. 

My plans for upcoming months-
While it’s uncertain to predict the future of the ongoing academic session 2021-22 at this moment, I personally feel Hybrid Learning with support of Cloud Based Services will prevail. In the coming months, I’m planning a major shift in my methodology (if I could implement) to become a ‘resource-provider’ to promote a student-centered learning approach wherein students themselves would think logically and discard misinformation available on the web which they’ve been totally relying on these days. If I could actually execute what I’ve planned, it would lead to improved learning for my students.

To conclude, I would say the pandemic might have been devastating for each of us in one way or the other, but I’ve genuinely upskilled myself to an extent and would continue bettering myself despite all challenges.

Committed to my duty wholeheartedly during COVID-19 and beyond.

because 

"Learning Should Never Stop."

This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.