These are unprecedented times! Being a mother, I feel our children have been the worst hit since the beginning of this pandemic. This lockdown-life has been most cruel to our little brains. Our kids have been living with an over-dosage of parents and a huge deficiency of friends and their social life. The scope of learning is now confined to their rooms and families. A smart learning plan could be to tweak their lessons, to suit their new normal.
Mr Ranjitsinh Disale, a teacher at Zilla Parishad Primary School, Paritewadi Solapur, in Maharashtra devised a brilliant idea. He created worksheets to teach the significance of power and water conservation. He shared these sheets, with his students, through QR Codes. The task was to record everyday data water and power consumption in their respective households. After a few days of this data compilation, Ranjit Sir explained the importance of these resources and brainstormed with children how to use them more efficiently. Together they analysed the data collected from each household and corrected their way of usage. “I realised that kids are now spending all their time at home. This can be a very good time to teach them the importance of these resources. I told them the changes required to be done. The kids realised the difference on their own,” said Ranjit Sir. “The next task was to bring these changes in their schedule. These were smart instructions like switching the lights off, advanced water storage and, planned consumption of water. Slowly kids and their parents realised that their daily consumption had come down. And after one month the difference reflected in their bills as well.”
Photo Credit: The Varkey Foundation
To give you a little background knowledge about Ranjit Sir, he is the winner of this year’s Global Teacher Award and the prize money of $1 Mn. This award is being established by the Varkey Foundation, and it entails a very stringent process to choose the winner from over 12000 entries from across the globe.
Your association with the Varkey foundation?
“Since winning the Global Teacher Prize at the end of last year I have had many opportunities through the Varkey Foundation to spread this international cooperation and sharing great ideas with many educators, official bodies and people generally, which has been a great gift.”
So, what was the big idea?
Ranjit Sir, transformed the fate of young girls in his village. These young girls were not allowed to attend school. They would be married at a younger age, and then sent to adjoining villages. After becoming young mother, the babies would be looked after by their grandparents, while these young girls would be expected to run the household or earn as daily wage labour. Ranjit sir had the task of turning this around. He not only convinced the villagers of their wrongdoing but also converted the lessons in the local language. Since the girls were not coming to school, he took the school their household, in digital format.
One day during his visit to a local grocery shop he discovered QR codes. He was intrigued to learn about this technique. “I came home and Googled it with its picture search feature. Once I had all the information, I started embedding the lesson with a unique QR code. I was excited since, I now had the opportunity to provide audio poems, video lectures, stories, and assignments. Earlier, I would give these lessons as video recordings and many times, the file would get corrupted. I used to meet the parents to convince them to buy at least one smartphone in a family. All I needed was one smartphone in each household.”
Photo Credit: The Varkey Foundation
He would analyse students’ response to their study material. He would change the content, activities, and assignments in the QR coded textbooks to create a personalized learning experience for each student. “We do not have any teenage marriage in our village now. And our school has 100 per cent attendance of girls.”
As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day, Ranjit Sir had hard work of 20 years behind this success. I prodded him about his childhood, and he revealed, “I was creative and curious. My father was also a teacher. Since childhood, I was keen to create new things. Once, Mr Vijay Bhatkar had visited our village school. I had created a computer monitor, with an old TV screen and other parts from various gadgets, and he was simply so impressed that he suggested me to patent it,” revealed Ranjit Sir.
Ranjit Sir’s project: Let’s cross the borders.
“The Global Peace Index 2016 said, that countries like India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran spends around $124 million to engage in conflict, I reasoned if they can afford to pay this much for conflict, peace is way cheaper. This is the basis of “Let’s Cross The Borders” where we connect students from India and Pakistan, North Korea and the US, Iran and Israel, countries where they have been traditional rivalries and conflicts. The students team up with a ‘peace buddy’ in another country and together they debate issues and share their experiences to understand what is behind the conflicts, where the hate speech comes from, how the news is reported differently in different countries, and importantly what these children value and share in common. They develop real empathy and compassion together and make lasting links and friendships. Then at the end of the course, when they become what we call ‘Peace Soldiers’ in a ‘Peace Army’ they have to report back to their schools about what they have learned in the project and then that school joins the Peace Army. By 2019 we had built a Peace Army of 12,000 students from eight countries.”
Photo Credit: The Varkey Foundation
It is so inspiring to see his work and that too with limited recourses. From a village, he could think of using QR codes to educate girls of his village. As Malala Yousafzai quotes in her book I am Malala, “One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.” Ranjit Sir changed the world for the girls of his village.
I asked him if he could share a message for parents like us, who are blessed with the gift of abundance, especially when it comes to their children “try and make your children problem solvers and inventors and not consumers. They should be able to think about solving problems and giving solutions back to society so that those who are underprivileged too get benefitted. Children who are privileged today can aim to be givers in society. This can create the right balance in the society for optimum growth of our future.”
He said and signed off!!
-Princy Jain
connect@princyjain.com