Primary children learning to draw and understand alphabet ‘W’ in a online class as they draw a watch, window and a watermelon.
The pre-primary wing of a school inevitably makes for its most heartening section. Cute, little handmade pictures on the blackboard, a teacher patiently drawing in chalk, helping tiny humans imagine words that sync with the alphabet.
When the pandemic hit the world last year, educational institutions found themselves more in need of technological assimilation than ever. Vijay Kiran Group, Bengaluru-based educational institutions, too faced an urgent need to take their classes online.
With more than 3000 students and 200-plus teachers across institutions, they needed a solution that would do justice to the teachers as well as the students. But could online classes do justice to pre-primary level students? This is where Samsung stepped in with the S Pen!
The Galaxy Tab S6 came as the perfect tool to enable continued teaching and learning. The aim was to not just retain the high points of the traditional classroom experience but to enhance it.
“With the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite and the S Pen, Samsung was able to support better collaboration between the students, teachers and management. This provided greater utility to teachers and resulted in elevating the quality of education for students,” said Akash Saxenaa, Senior Director, Enterprise Sales, Samsung India.
Teacher Mamta Kabra taking an online class using Samsung Tab S6.
Improved classroom feeling with the S Pen
One of the first challenges faced by teachers while going digital for the first time is letting go of the pen and paper. This often leads to duplication of effort as purely as a matter of habit, teachers first make their notes using pen and paper and then type them out.
“The pandemic dispelled schools from the normal. Teachers had to teach with the best available resource in the environment placed, to ensure learning continued for the students. As a solution to ease the discomfort of teachers, VKGI-NCFE adopted the Samsung Tab along with the S Pen. This led to a rise in productivity and comfort for employees and quality online instruction became the norm. It was a game changer for the organization and we are grateful to Samsung for their support,” said Sunalini Benjamin, Chief Operating Officer, Vijay Kiran Education Trust.
The S Pen brings the comfort of pen and paper to online teaching. Using the S Pen, teachers can directly write on the screen. The handwriting recognition feature turns this into digital text and helps teachers prepare effective lesson plans with interesting activities in half the time. They can even give feedback and tips to students by adding handwritten annotations to textbook content.
“Samsung tablets made our lives very easy during the pandemic. The interface made the transition from classroom teaching to digital teaching very comfortable for teachers. The tablets have enough storage for the teachers to prepare and save their teaching material,” said Gowri Kurapati, Head of Pre-Primary, National Centre for Excellence, Vijay Kiran Education Trust.
The S Pen makes digital teaching effective across age groups. “The most heartening feedback we got on digital teaching was from pre-primary teachers. Using the S Pen, teachers can draw on the screen-board in real time. Since younger students are into a habit of learning with representational pictures, this is ideal,” she explains.
Teacher Shikha Badal teaching students how to draw Hindi alphabet ‘श’.
Teacher collaboration made digital with Knox
In the traditional set-up, teachers spend a lot of time working together to build the most effective teaching strategies. Samsung kept in mind that with remote teaching, this process should be further improved.
This was managed with Samsung Knox. Samsung Knox is a proprietary security framework pre-installed on most Samsung mobile devices. It protects the data on the device with vault-like security and has a toolset to keep the devices updated remotely.
With the Knox-empowered Galaxy Tab S6, all teachers relied on uniform infrastructure for their lessons. Knox configure ensured that all teachers used the latest version of the apps. This helped in making the collaboration between teachers easier.
Teacher Kanakvally LN taking an online class using the SPen.
Notebook feels for enhanced student engagement
The tablet has powerful features that enable seamless engagement with the students. Gowri explains how these often build upon and go beyond the classroom experience. She says, “In the classroom, there is only green board and chalk. The tablet gives a wider colour palate to the teachers. This is especially useful with primary-level students as visual learning is a big part of their development. The students clearly enjoy story time with animation and rhyme time with powerpoint presentations.”
“The Samsung Tab S6 has a feature where the pattern of the notebook page can be taken as the background. That has been immensely useful. Whether it’s teaching how to write on a four-lined pattern or teaching mathematics on a page that has a box pattern. It gives greater clarity on how to write neatly and stay within boxes,” Gowri Kurapati adds.
As schools are set to gradually reopen and resume classroom teaching, the Vijay Kiran trust aims to keep using the new skills acquired during the pandemic. We at Samsung India take pride in having played our part in further enhancing the teaching and learning process.
