The Progressive School Vol 01 Issue 04

outlook
Smart Schools–
a myth or a reality?
Avnita Bir
Director-Principal at R N Podar School, Mumbai.
In Twitter lingo, the term ‘Personalization in Education’
is trending and smart schools have become the
buzzword for new age schools and edtech companies.
They are increasingly being seen as the panacea
for those wanting to jump onto the bandwagon of
imparting 21st century skills to students. But, are smart
schools a reality?
The advent of technology in the
classroom has meant different
things to different stakeholders.
For school managements, it provided
the much-needed frill value that could
distinguish their schools from the rest.
For teachers, it forebodes a sense of
fear and trepidation that any change at
workplace brings with it. For parents, it
signaled a better education albeit at an
increased cost. Not many understood how
technology should or could be integrated
seamlessly into the teaching-learning
process. And myth and reality became
inseparable! While schools recognized
that technology was a reality they could
not ignore if they had to survive in the
21st century, not many understood the
layers and the nuances of the same.
Ranging all the way from devices and
hardware, to software, ERP solutions,
Learning Management Systems, apps,
social, collaborative, productivity tools,
to digital content, assessment tools and
data-driven achievement analytics, smart
schools acquired new meaning in the
Avnita Bir is an economist and the
Director-Principal of the R. N. Podar
School in Mumbai. She has worked in
the Indian education system for more
than 15 years, and she was a curator
for Learn Shift India 2012, a conference
held at Delhi, which was aimed at
exchanging ideas on transforming
Indian education.
SOPs of schools. A paradigm shift
in education was being heralded!
Case file…
R N Podar School has always
been a technology-driven school.
Situated in the densely populated
city of Mumbai, and facing many
unique constraints of both space
and time, we had to increasingly
look for solutions that would help
us to overcome our challenges
efficiently and effectively.
Technology used appropriately
and prudently, proved to be a
great boon in a resource-strapped
school. The fact that we could
self-learn, customize and improvise our
interface with new tools added to the
comfort that we felt in integrating them
into our school.
For us, technology has become
synonymous with empowerment. It has
meant a kind of liberation from routine
tasks that could now be performed more
efficiently and effectively and have
brought the excitement back into our
work life. Starting from Smart boards
in classrooms, educational content
and software for different subjects, to
teachers learning to make PowerPoint
presentations and creating their own
content, generic digital content and
animations to catch the attention of
students, our classrooms continued to
evolve as we experimented with Cloud
Computing and use of Google Apps for
Education, went on to do a pilot with
Khan Academy and explored the benefits
of Flipped Classrooms.
The joy came not from getting a
new ready-made solution by an edtech
company that designed products in
their silos and often didn’t understand
the teachers’ needs or the students’
psychology. The exhilaration that
teachers felt when they discovered,
tried out and learnt to use a new tool to
engage their students, the aha feeling
of success after a series of failures, the
strengthening of the bond between
the teacher and her students as both
embarked on a journey of learning…
all pointed to an organic process of
integrating technology seamlessly into
the teaching-learning process.
What evolved as a result of this tryst
with technology was not just buy-in from
the teachers but the building of a culture
of innovation and creative problem
solving. We explored the use of Design
Thinking and Maker DIY activities that
encouraged creative thinking and led
to the building of creative confidence
among students as well as teachers. A
whole new world of possibilities opened
up even as we redefined the teachinglearning
process. Technology and Smart
classrooms were enablers to enhance the
10 THE PROGRESSIVE SCHOOL jul-AUG-SEP 2017