A good education forms the base of a good life & teachers have a major role to play in shaping up the future of the country by providing right learning at the right age. Education being such a broad domain includes different areas to develop in kids like academic, personality & soft skill and critical thinking ability and it includes different measure to work on individual areas for kids. Implementing different strategies for kids in order to focus on developing all abilities is a task & creates huge workload on teachers sparing very little time left.
As per a recent survey by Mc Kinsey, it’s been observed that usually a teacher spends more than 50 hours a week in school and 10 hrs. after school to teach, evaluate, complete paper & administrative work, lesson planning & design curriculums for the kids.
In many countries because of increasing workload the attrition rate in teaching profession is higher. Here, implementation of technologies in the existing pedagogy may be a beam of hope to reduce the workload of teachers & save their time. The emerging technologies like Digital classrooms, cloud-based learning models, digital content resources, Artificial intelligence will increase the teaching efficiency saving a major portion of their everyday time. This spared time can effectively be utilised towards supporting activities which will lead in better & productive learning experience. Further advances in technology could result in changes to classroom structure and learning modalities
Below are some points where Technology can help in reducing the workload of teachers:
Lesson planning & preparation
Teachers spend their maximum time in planning & preparing the teaching material for the class sessions. Technology provides them means to optimize the resources effectively, access world class digital content & resources & collaborate on soft wares to align & arrange the relevant material as per the curriculum. The content software available for K-12 is designed as per the standard CBSE curriculum & covers all the topics & subjects assigned. Similarly the Higher education content software has the topics and content designed as per the stream & assigned authors. Such software help teachers to share world class standard resources with the students in no time. Teachers can also design problem & practise sets for different subjects saving them 4 to 5 hrs. per week to engage in extra learning enhancing activities.
Evaluation & Feedback
Evaluation & feedback are the most essential part of the teaching learning loop as it helps teachers & students to understand where exactly the individual student is lacking and requires better understanding. Accordingly, teacher & student can plan the next step in direction of improvement & practise.
Improve student’s performance
Teachers are using flipped learning technology in classroom wherein they assign self-paced videos as homework to students to understand any concept taught in the class. This way teacher and students can discuss the concept in the class & teacher can figure out gaps in the concept understanding. This also saves a lot of time on teacher’s hand.
Conduct online classes
Through virtual platforms available, teachers can conduct online sessions to teach in real time connecting with n no. of students at a certain time. This way teachers can deliver lectures from anywhere and share learning material online. Such sessions can also be recorded for future reference of students.
Administration & Paperwork
Automation software can easily reduce the amount of time teachers spend on administrative activities. Such software can help in creating forms, preparing reports, maintaining database, maintaining inventories digitally. Students can also access forms & database digitally, fill & submit it online rather than interacting with teachers. Parents can track the student’s report & progress online and stay connected with the teacher. Such facilities save no. of hours in a teacher’s life and foster better teaching strategies in the educational institutions.
Much of the time saved can help teachers to improve education through more personalized & focussed teaching & learning for individual students & come up with innovative teaching strategies to make learning more interactive, engaging & effective.
Though technology is never meant to replace a teacher, but it can be a facilitator to foster better learning outcome & make teaching a less hectic yet more effective experience for people.