Learning as a natural human activity is moulded by personal experiences and cognitive awareness. It is also shaped and influenced by personal biases, opinions, cultural contexts, and the social environment of the learner. Learning can, in simple words, be stated as a stable and persistent change in the cognitive sphere and the being of the learner. In other words, learning is what a person is capable of knowing and doing. Such a transformation is a collective pursuit. Learning happens when an individual interacts with others to share knowledge and skills. Understanding learners’ micro and macro contexts, therefore, is the first critical step in designing a learning experience that will work well for them individually. The ‘learning context’ includes goals and motivations, and also the capacity to pay attention, memory, and emotional state. Learning is not a purely mental activity: all learning is embedded in its social, cultural, and historical context. Learning happens in the brain, the body, and beyond. “Brains are in bodies, bodies are in the world, and meaningful action in these worlds is in large part socially constructed and conducted (Learnjam, 2021).” We learn by paying attention and building networks of knowledge. The world is full of stimuli that we somehow need to selectively filter and pay conscious attention to. What we do know is that by filtering, attending to, and connecting the stimuli we encounter. We reinforce and consolidate networks of knowledge in our long-term memory. These networks are known as ‘mental models’ or ‘schemata’. These ultimately guide our understanding, decisions, and actions. The brain has limited processing power and not all motivation are equal. Image: Wikimedia Commons, by Wise Droid, CC-BY-SA-4.0 Tech-enabled learning ecologies

Digital technology tools for the classroom Are you a teacher or course creator looking to improve the learning experience in your digital classrooms? If so, digital classroom tools can help. In fact, 95% of online teachers use various digital tools to improve the teaching experience. The good news is that advances in technology have made it easier than ever to broadcast digital content for schools. There are a lot of tools out there. From learning management systems to apps to software, these tools can help a digital school in India to create a better, more integrated learning experience.

The future of education is digital, and today’s students must be prepared for this digital future. They are learning through the digital medium, both in school and at home. As an educator, are you offering the best online education? Information and Communications Technology (ICT) can impact student learning when teachers are digitally literate and understand how to integrate it into the curriculum. Computers in the ICT lab in school are used to communicate, create, disseminate, store, and manage information. With ICT tools come a new set of issues: Are you prepared to face the challenges of securing computers in ICT Labs from online threats? If you’re not, now is the time to act. Now is the time to face these challenges head-on. Now is the time to prepare yourself and your school for the future.

In this issue of Rubaroo, we bring to you another interesting query from our ongoing conversations with students through our online mentorship program, Geneo Mentor . So this time it is about a very naïve and intriguing question about a phenomenon in nature that we are all encountering – Rains . You hear this word and it feels as if water is flowing through your body, suddenly your sense of olfaction heightens and you can taste the wet soil and feel the mushy grounds beneath your feet; all this while sitting in your room, sipping a cup of hot tea and watching the rain from your window. Amazing! Is it not? We mean the feeling and of course the rains… Let us read below to know all about it…

The best of India’s leading edtech companies have created a self-regulatory body to ensure that every learner has access to high-quality, low-cost education. Under the leadership of the best Edtech companies in India , the India EdTech Consortium has been created to ensure quality standards for future learners in India. Schoolnet, one of the pioneers in providing K 12 solutions to students wholeheartedly supports this.

10 th May 1857. Meerut. It was a quiet Sunday morning. The Sun was setting unsuspectingly over the horizon. Most of the European officers of the Meerut cantonment were preparing to attend church. The European soldiers were off duty. Some of them had gone into canteens, others strayed the bazaar in Meerut. Suddenly, the dust rising from under the feet of the sepoys of the 3 rd Bengal Light Cavalry covered the sky ominously. What followed is a glorious history known as the .

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New-age schools and colleges are offering Smart Classroom to their students to stand out from the clutter of educational institutions. These technology-enabled classrooms offer teaching and learning courses by integrating learning technology, such as computers, specialized software, audience response technology, assistive listening devices, networking, and audio/visual capabilities. The fast adoption of EdTech advancements is going to revolutionize the way students learn and upskill themselves. IoT (Internet Of Things) systems are spearheading these incredible developments. IoT has the power to assist you in making correct decisions based on data it collates to streamline every aspect of human activity and make life simple. Making this possible is a network of sensors and actuators in IoT systems that erase the division between the physical and digital worlds. Smart Classroom: IoT Is All Around Us Internet of things (IoT) connects physical objects with the Internet. It collects data from smart devices and shares the information with you to enable smart decision-making. The IoT concept utilises different technologies like sensors, machine learning, artificial intelligence, real-time analysis, and embedded systems. IoT applications are reaching smart cities, cars, devices, entertainment systems, homes, and connected healthcare. These devices improve productivity and quality of life. The Importance of Modernizing the Education Sector

Learning is not an automatic process. It requires the learner to be engaged with what they’re learning.  Only this can make the learning process exciting. This is where digital learning solutions for schools step in. It has been successful due to the far and the wide reach of the internet in India. Today, EdTech service providers are transforming the educational ecosystem with accessible and affordable quality education by leveraging technology. They are offering comprehensive learning solutions for a wide spectrum of age groups in schools. Various government and private schools across India, who didn’t look beyond traditional learning models, were amazed at the prospects that digital learning solutions for schools bring. They were amazed by the innovation and the personalized approach. Today, digital content for schools is being adopted by more and more educational institutions as a part of their teaching process. EdTech companies are delivering innovative and scalable solutions to government and private schools across India for improving the quality of K-12 education. New-age learning solutions - Geneo

The pandemic threw a spanner in the works of a slowly improving Indian education system. It also exacerbated the digital divide as millions of students in the middle and the bottom of the pyramid were left in the lurch while others shifted to online learning easily. With digital infrastructure becoming a necessity, there must be a concerted effort to gather data on the status of the digitalization of schools. Recently, the Ministry of Education released the Performance Grading Index (PGI) which assigns scores to states/UTs based on infrastructure, equity, learning outcomes, access, and governance processes. We believe that going forward, as technology plays a more central role in our lives, the PGI must include wider metrics for assessing the status and role of digital infrastructure in providing quality education. This will help in creating evidence-based policy decisions and a set of best practices for states to rely upon. In 2019-20 (the pre-COVID year), 33 states and UTs improved their scores in the PGI. The top five states/UTs (Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Chandigarh) were classified into Level II, however, the 31 States in Level III or lower still have a long way to go. The Education Ministry has avoided ranking states to eliminate "the stigma of underperformance", but instead has grouped them into performance levels. This is meant to create a community of best practices through a resource-sharing tool for states to learn from one another. In this vein, the report identifies two domains as weak links - governance processes and infrastructure. Governance parameters including shortages of teachers, principals and staff, poor supervision and inspection, and inadequate training of teachers will improve with greater political will and local administrative agencies taking ownership of the learning crisis. As a subset of infrastructure, digital infrastructure has acquired urgent importance. With COVID-19 worsening the already woeful state of education, ICT-enabled tools will become key strategies for remediation of learning loss and improving PGI scores. The states in Level II performed well on ICT-related sub-domains, but 28 states scored less than 80% of the maximum score on having Computer-Aided Learning in upper primary schools, and 18 states scored similarly on having computer labs in secondary schools – the only two ways in which the PGI measures digital infrastructure. States like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand scored as poorly as 2 on 20 in this domain. Inside the classroom, digital infrastructure provides modern and user-friendly tools for the teacher to effectively engage the students, enable deeper conceptual understanding and retention, and improve learning outcomes. This requires a focus on digital pedagogy as a function of teachers’ professional development. While the PGI does account for the sanctioned number of days of training, it misses out on assessing the value of the training provided, including in digital pedagogy. The COVID-19 crisis showed the extent to which teachers were left untrained in this domain, leading to students’ learning suffering. Punjab converted 67.2% of its government-run schools into smart schools and saw heartening results from students and teachers. This resulted in Punjab climbing to the top of PGI in 2019-20 from the 13th position in 2017-18. At the other corner of the country, Kerala became the first state to have completely in all public schools. Outside the classroom, both states launched programs on Zoom/Whatsapp to prevent learning disruptions during the lockdowns. Thus, building the capacity of schools has a cascading effect in not only improving PGI scores, but in augmenting the entire ecosystem of teaching, learning, and learning outcomes. As the report mentions, these are critical inputs for student performance and provision of quality education as per international standards.

It was only till a year ago that education seemed to be the same as it had been for decades -  crammed classrooms, unappreciated teachers, and one size fits all content. But, in the midst of all of that, there was still the fun of going to school, of meeting friends and colleagues, and learning through interaction. In a crowded classroom, teachers still managed to teach and keep children engaged, albeit with varying impact and success, and teaching-learning continued through verbal and non-verbal communication. Cut to the post pandemic world, all of that seems to have disappeared suddenly. Students have ceased to be physical entities and reduced to faceless, static tiles on the computer screen. In a digital reality necessitated by circumstances, teachers and students have started missing the physical interaction that a school facilitates. My seven-year-old daughter’s craving to go back to school is a reliable  testimony to that. But it seems, the times have something else in store for us - online learning is here to stay. It is, at the same time, also certain, that online mode of teaching alone will not be sufficient, let alone be an efficacious way of learning. We are therefore, bound to see more and more of a blended pedagogical approach in times to come. With so many digital tools available, technology pundits have often argued, the 'learning crisis' would be solved in a jiffy. But, the ground reality seems to be different as there’s less coffee and more froth.  I, like many others, believe that it was never a 'learning crisis'. It was more of a 'teaching crisis' or an 'implementation crisis'. And, this can get deeper, as we rapidly move to an online, albeit blended, teaching-learning world. I can see that happening almost everyday during my daughter’s ongoing online classes. Teachers are now faced with an altogether new challenge. How to keep the learner engaged and motivated? How to ensure that meaningful learning continues to happen? Looking through the prism of Clayton Christensen’s Jobs-To-Be-Done (JBTD) framework, a teacher now needs to 'hire' new instructional practices so that:

Last week, we had delved into four levels of active listening. 1. Level 1: Downloading 2. Level 2: Factual listening 3. Level 3: Empathetic listening 4. Level 4: Generative listening