A retrospective of 2020-21
The year of 2020-21 has been a difficult year for everyone all around the world with the outbreak of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Schools all over the world have had to transition from a physical mode of education to an online one, and this was met with a lot of scepticism and fear as no one was prepared for this change. The School was quick to adapt with excellent use of technology, providing good quality teaching through the online medium and making students, parents and staff embrace this new era of education.
1) Microsoft Teams for Live classes
As soon as The School understood that lockdowns would be imposed for long durations of time and that opening of the physical school would be unlikely in the academic year, focuses shifted to providing the best platform for education online, which came in the form of the Office 365 platform. One of the features of the Office 365 platform is Microsoft Teams. With Microsoft Teams students were able to join live online classes from their mobiles/ laptops. Since the sessions were conducted live, students were able to interact with the teachers and could ask questions or get their doubts solved. Detailed pdfs on how to join Microsoft Teams were provided to parents in advance and technical support calls were done so that everyone could use the platform seamlessly. Teachers were also able to share either pre-made ppts or videos during the live classes to engage the student’s attention and further increase the quality of the live classes. In case any student missed any class or wanted to revise a class previously taken, they were easily able to do so with Microsoft Stream, which is a platform where all the live classes are stored as a database and can be accessed by the students at any time, a feature which would have been impossible to execute in a physical
classroom.
2) OneDrive for Pre-recorded videos
In addition to the live classes, our teachers made pre-recorded videos and ppts of the syllabus topics to provide additional information and strengthen the concepts taught in the live classes. These videos were uploaded to OneDrive. OneDrive is a virtual space on the internet where data can be stored and shared with others. With OneDrive, students could directly access these teaching materials without having to download it, thus saving the bandwidth of students and creating a library of the information which the students could access at any time.
3) Assignments for testing
With the Assignments Section, students could be tested on the various syllabus topics or given homework. This could be used to gauge the student’s understanding of each and every topic, provide them with practise when given as homework or to test them and push them to the next level in their educational journey. We conducted certain assignments where students had to submit pictures of their work so that their handwriting could be checked and they could get practise for the language subjects like English, Hindi, etc. There were also assignments which were MCQ based questions which would be autocorrected and tell the students where they went right or wrong. All our FA and SA examinations for 2020-21 were conducted seamlessly with the Assignments feature.
4) Tools for Excel, PowerPoint, Word, etc
With the Office 365 id that was provided to students, they were also provided with Office 365 Excel, PowerPoint and Word. Students were able to use these tools for various projects, assignments and for notes throughout the year, greatly increasing their computer literacy and making them comfortable on the use of these software.
5) Digitalization of Payments
The School was able to use its ERP Software to allow parents easy and seamless digital payments for their instalments. This was a great help for parents, as they could make credit card, debit card or UPI payments for the School Fee without any need for coming to the school.
6) Fee Relief
The pandemic brought a lot of global economic problems which impacted lots of people. Many people lost their jobs and many had their salaries reduced. This caused many people to go to the Schools and ask for reductions or concessions on School Fee. While there was no Government directive asking schools to provide any such relief, the School proactively issued refunds to any parents who couldn’t/ didn’t want to continue, as well as providing parents who continued with fee relief. Despite the huge economic drain, the school had to face, it went ahead with this decision keeping in mind the difficult economic crisis caused to various people by the pandemic. We were one of the few schools to take such a decision and have been appreciated by all for our stance in the fight against covid.
7) Impressions and Inspirations
With online schooling, the school had an opportunity to do some unique activities which were difficult to execute in a physical medium. One of these was Impressions and Interactions, in which various people from different professions came to talk to our children about their jobs, the importance of it and the challenges that they face in it. This exposed children to the various industries and inspired many of them to think of different career paths like art, dentistry, yoga, etc. Even though this year has been extremely difficult for everyone around the world, the Neuron Labs Family has stood strong during this tough time. The cooperation and contributions of the parents along with the efforts of the staff has ensured that none of our students have suffered academically and has given them an example of the power of staying united and facing difficult situations together.