Faced with power outages at the homes of many of their 1,200 students, several of whom live in outlying villages, the teachers and management of South Gujarat’s Bardoli Parsi Zarathushti Educational and Charitable Trust’s English Medium Primary School and Perin and Bomansha Mehta Secondary School (Schools) came up with an innovative solution to provide seamless electronic "classroom” sessions in the times of lockdown.
A traditional classroom in progress in the Bardoli Schools in pre-Covid times
"The teachers prepare their videos in the classrooms with the help of all educational aids and support. These videos are uploaded on the Schools’ app along with files for homework” for the corresponding lesson, managing trustee Pervez Mehta told Parsiana on June 16, 2020. "Parents can download these videos at their convenience and free time... They can keep showing the videos repeatedly to the children,” Mehta stated. In a "traditional” online class, both the teacher and the student have to be online at the same time. If the lesson is "lost” for reasons like electricity failures, it cannot be repeated. The Schools’ system also obviates the need to have multiple devices to log on, in the case of families with a number of children, said Mehta.
"We started this from June 2020 for classes one to eight, and all the parents appreciated this a lot,” said the managing trustee. In the early stages, teachers had to find spots with good connectivity to transmit lessons. "A few even sent off lessons from tree tops,” he appreciated. The Schools’ office staff assisted schools in Navsari to adapt to this system for their students too, shared the proud trustee.
Besides Mehta, the other office bearers are Homi Pithawala (president), Yasmine Sanjana, Jaloo Mehta and Aspi Sanjana.
Reportedly, one school in Bombay too follows this system to take care of the needs of a few students who have migrated to their hometowns.