Travel Through Tales:Post -Lockdown Life, Episode 1

Reduce Digital Disjoint

Although, the pandemic has resulted in teaching and learning at the comfort of our home, not all are equipped and supported to adapt for new methodologies, specially the children from government schools. In the journey from lack of education to lack of online education, we have lost and gained countless children.Paradigm shift is challenging and cannot be accomodated by anyone and everyone.

It has become a new norm for us to worry about losing our jobs, having pay cut offs, sitting idle at home.

We never thought of thousands of children out there sitting idle, having nothing to work on, it does sound fun, but the paradigm shift created

Lack of Digitalization and Network Access : Less than one-fourth of the households have internet access, TRAI says, 78% of Indians have mobile phones out of which more than 55% are settled in rural areas, imagine the signal strength for calling let alone the video conferencing. “Can one afford a broadband connection or a perfect data pack while running the house on daily wages?”

We know what they say, “They are struggling for earning bread”, “Humans are dying, who cares about education?”

We cannot change the world on our own, we can contribute for the betterment of at least a handful. Now is the time to stop worrying about the past or what we cannot control,adapt, and think about next basic need; Education for all, perhaps Online Education for all.

Our emotional stability is hanging by a thread, forget about helping others we are failing to help ourselves. During this time of realization, we experimented something new for the physically disabled, orphan, street children to level up their confidence, learning and speaking skills, by conducting an online session.

They were all excited and happy to meet me on a screen, I do not know their language much yet the connection, network as well as personal, was strong proving language is not just words. Day one was to get a hold of things and test how well it works out, I told them the extended version of “Hare and the Tortoise” and story of “Demosthenes, the Greek Orator” using a few slides. After all, we are connected through the stories we listen to. Listening to stories increase the brain power, imagination in children while the videos we show will hamper their creativity.

Here is a call for those who are willing to take a break from Skype/Teams/Slack and join Zoom for some fun activities with children where you can teach anything irrespective of field or subject because we know knowledge is limited, and of course to their level of understanding.

Written by Kusumanjali patel