Tag: student voice

The ruthless approach of private institutes.

Right to education a right that is just on the paper. The pandemic situation makes access to education more challenging. The expensive fees of institutes, colleges, and tuition teachers along with the cost of digital gadgets. Make it a dream for the unprivileged child. Along with expensive gadgets, the additional cost of the internet is a matter of concern. This all thing make together cost of education very expensive. That is not affordable for all. The Pandemic hit makes our environment full of grief. Many lost their loved ones as well as earning hands. The question is in that situation how an innocent child pays for the education expenses. the answer is simple. The unprivileged child eventually drops out of school. People have to deal with financial pressure and subsequent anxiety. The pandemic has financially impacted the Indian middle and upper-middle class. Also many lost their jobs during the covid19 hit. The savings are diverted towards the needs. The reduction in earnings with the additional monthly cost of electricity, rent, and other bills make education cost impracticable.

Even during this time that certain private colleges are charging mercilessly an expensive amount of fees. This has put enormous pressure on families that sometimes have only one earning member per family. OR those who lost only earning members of the family. They have continued with their regular scheme of fees without issuing even the slightest bit of deduction. Even the government is not supporting the pitty family;
Even though government gives the judgment that Colleges should not charge more than the students’ tuition fees because they practically have online-only classes. Many students think it is not justified to charge students for the facilities they are no costs such as the library, sports grounds, canteen, etc. Some colleges have given ridiculous explanations about electricity bills, infrastructural cost and maintenance fees. But on the ground private institution didn’t care about this judgment and continue to charge whole fees from the students.
The colleges even ruthlessly pressuring the students and the parents to pay the semester fees on time, which would result in serious consequences if not paid. Private colleges are still looking at their profit margin even during a pandemic. The second wave hit more badly than the first wave. half of the population is covid positive. and admitted to the hospital looking for the medicine, oxygen cylinder, and ICU wards. The grief situation as well as the financial expense in the medical treatment. Given the scarcity of beds, private hospitals are charging a huge amount to the patients’ families. They have no option but to comply. The medical expenses are an additional burden that they have to bear. The bills keep adding and resulted in borrowing .and then never adding a circle of depth began. In such a sad situation how can a student pay his fees?

The students not only have to give compulsory examinations but they also have to pay with the financial expenses. Owing to this expense, students in the middle and lower strata of society are thinking to drop out the college. They are taking up whatever odd jobs they can get with little pay to support their family. Many of them had plans to pursue degrees post-graduation, but they have no option but to give up given the circumstances. In certain families with more than two children, it is becoming an increasing burden for the earning member to keep up with the rising expenses.

Lack of income source, lack of money, and diversion of savings towards basic needs as well as medical expenditures are some of the reasons stated by students facing such a crisis. Even authorities are not assisting the common people. Government is silent on this issue. That’s the reason many students give theatre life as being hopeless by committing suicide. Students want the college to either waive off the fees or provide them with some aid or assistance. The absolute lack of understanding for students has been reflected by these colleges. The mental fatigue and pain caused by this constant pressure are harmful to the well-being of students and parents as well.
It is unfair on the part of private colleges to seek their profits during the pandemic situation. Instead of charging such a high amount, they should either waive it off for students going through a financial crisis or charge them just the tuition fee. The students are already facing mental pressure and anxiety. There is a lack of accessibility to online education existing already. Some have had to purchase laptops, good mobile sets, and costly data packs to attend classes. To assume that everyone’s financial condition will remain unaffected because they belong to a privileged background is wrong and fallacious.
Some colleges are giving excuses that they have to pay to there teachers. Therefore they have to ask for money. But it is not convincing enough for the students who have time and again asked for a breakup of the fee structure. The students are helpless at this point. Even after approaching multiple authorities, they have not received a helpful solution. We can help these needy students through our small contribution. We common people should assist those who are in need.

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Email Etiquettes For Students

Simple rules to send a respectful email that won’t get you on your professor’s bad side. 

Rule 1 – Answer swiftly

 Anyone who sends you an email they’ll want quick responses. The golden rule for email is to reply within 24 hours, and preferably within the same day itself. If your response email is complicated, just send an email confirming receipt and letting them know that you will get back to them. This will ease the senders mind! 

Rule 2 – Use a meaningful subject line

 When filling the subject line, make sure that you mention what the email is for or in regards to. You don’t want it to seem like a randomly generated subject and end up in your professor’s spam folder. It also makes it easier to search for old emails when the subject line is relevant and specific to the content of the email. 

Rule 3 – Read your email before you send it 

Prior to sending your email, be sure that you proofread your message. You shouldn’t write your email as though you are texting your friend. Make sure it’s got full sentences, proper grammar, and real spelling. Look out for potential misunderstandings, the tone, and inappropriate comments. 

Rule 4 – Abbreviations & emoticons 

Be careful using email abbreviations such as BTW (by the way) and LOL (laugh out loud) in formal emails. Even today, some people still don’t know what they mean, so it’s better to drop them. 

Rule 5 – Be concise

 Be succinct and keep your message short and to the point. Your professor is going to have probably hundreds of email messages to wade through each day. Just get to the point and politely, respectfully, ask your request.  If it has to be long, consider including a synopsis at the top of the email. Make sure you are as clear as possible about what it is you need to ask of your professor without writing a novel. 

Rule 6 – Do not write in CAPITALS 

IF YOU WRITE IN CAPITALS IT SEEMS AS IF YOU ARE SHOUTING!! Therefore, try not to send email text in capitals. 

Rule 7 – Use a professional email address

 This marks the message as legitimate and not spam. You should always have an email address that conveys your name so that the professor an idea of who’s sending the message. Never use email addresses, perhaps remnants of your grade-school days, that are not appropriate for use in a formal setting, such as “supergirlrocks@…” or “pizzalover@…”.

Rule 8 – Use professional salutations 

Don’t use laid-back, colloquial expressions like, ‘Hi’ or ‘Yo’. Address your professor directly; don’t just launch straight into a request. Examples: ‘Respected Dr. Kapoor’, ‘Dear, Ms. Gupta’, ‘Dr. Sharma, I hope this email finds you well…’. 

Rule 9 – Be polite

Don’t make demands, don’t accuse, remember to write please and thank you. Close your email with something polite like ‘Thanks’, ‘Thanks for your time’, ‘See you in class Wednesday’, ‘regards’, etc. Then re-type your first name 

Impact of Covid-19 Lockdown on Students

Covid- 19 pandemic sparked widespread realization that our way of thinking is not working. It has shattered our understanding of what culture as we know it is natural and deconstructed. Education is one of those crucial fields, where the need for improvement has become apparent. The coronavirus’ consequences, and thus its preventive interventions, have turned the lives of students, parents, and teachers upside down. The clear imbalance in the ‘normal’ workings of education has put emphasis on many questions that were previously asked and left unanswered afterwards. So, what might the actual effects of this global pandemic mean for the education future?

While coronavirus keeps spreading throughout the entire planet, many countries have decided to close educational institutions as part of a policy of social distancing to slow transmission of the virus. However, this closure of schools, due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, has affected the learning of more than 1.5 billion children and youth globally. It should be acknowledged that school closures are likely to widen the learning gap between the lower-income and higher-income families among children. Although many parents who have access to technology and the internet are gradually turning to online education technologies to keep their children studying at home while others may not be able to. In a survey conducted by India Welfare Trust, it has shed some light on how children endure the disproportionate burden of the astonishing outbreak According to the survey, 89 per cent of respondents believe that the delay in lifting the coronavirus lockdown will affect their children’s learning.

Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here's How. - POLITICO

Rapid Online Perception study investigates the impact of Covid-19 on Children. During the survey, 1,102 respondents from 23 states and territories of the Union were interviewed. “While children have not been in the face of this pandemic as they have been mostly shielded from Covid-19’s direct health effects so far, results from the study suggest that they have been among its biggest casualties with numerous side effects on their physical and psycho-social well-being,” said CRY chief executive Puja Marwaha.

“More than half of the parents reported their child became more flustered and apprehensive during the lockdown,” the report said, adding, and “37 percent of respondents confirmed that the child’s mental well-being and happiness had been affected by the lockdown. In addition, 88 percent of respondents said that their children’s exposure to screens increased during the lockdown, with 45 percent reporting the increase “to a large extent” and only 43 percent of parents/primary caregivers said they were always supervising the child when it was online.

The things we can keep in mind while opening educational institutions post lockdown are:

Changing the way of Learning:

The teaching method and the way syllabuses are taught can change. Aspects once deemed fundamental to education can be revised to cater the life skills of the future in large measure. Not only careers but also future residents will need skills such as resilience, versatility, collaboration, communication, compassion and understanding, originality and emotional maturity. School learning will have a new purpose, and that will be a major departure from today’s details-focused education.

Implementing innovative methods in education system:

Aside from the upheaval faced by the novel coronavirus, there have been some major changes in schooling in our developing nations. Yet, even in the face of rapid innovation, the way we deliver education still needs to be shifted. Learning is knowledge acquisition, but it doesn’t have to occur primarily through age-old methods that don’t leverage the highest brain potential. Can students get an experience that shapes their learning, rather than being taught? Approaches such as integrated learning and experiential learning, with greater digital transformation, will fuel the future of school education.

Strengthening the bond with technology:

New technologies such as Zoom and Google Meet have been identified as a prominent life-saver in the face of a crippling pandemic. Communication is crucial to our interconnected existence, and the driving force that maintains our connections is technology. For education, that means creating content and delivery systems that make full use of and harness technology. Maybe education can become more flexible and accessible, giving up on its excessive-reliance on rigid structures that we consider necessary at the moment. They are generations identified by their use of technology; it has become an extension of their consciousness and without it, they don’t know a planet.

The future of education should find no room to ignore the use of technology as it can very well be the best platform for empowering learning in an age which integrates technology as a way of life. Such generations will have an effect on the evolution of education because they are the ones most impacted by the pandemic and are in the best place to learn from it and evolve from it.

Emotional Check-Ins in a Teaching Webinar

I always start my classes with some form of emotional check-in regardless of age or grade level. I do so in my college classes as well as in my elementary gifted classes. I think this is even more imperative given the stress students are experiencing due to COVID19. The 10 to 15 minutes it takes is so worth the class time.

Some of the benefits of emotional check-ins discussed in the Edutopia article, A Simple but Powerful Class Opening Activity, include:

Students know that every voice matters: The emotional check-in gets every student’s voice into the room at the start of each class. Although students can always say “pass” instead of sharing, each student has the opportunity to be heard every class session. The check-in is also a great opportunity to practice active listening, turn-taking, and following group norms.

Students develop awareness of others’ emotions—and how to respond to them: When students share their emotions during the check-in, they give their classmates a snapshot of their emotional state. And if I hear a student say that “I didn’t sleep much last night” or “I feel like I can’t focus today,” I can adjust my interactions with that person accordingly.

The check-ins also acknowledge that how students are feeling is important to the educator, that they matter as human beings who have feelings and emotions.

One of my college classes moved from face-to-face to Zoom this semester. What follows are some of the check-in activities I have done with them.

Using a Feeling Chart

Students use a feeling chart to describe how they are feeling. A side benefit of using feeling charts is that they help students increase their feelings vocabulary.

Source: Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry

Share a Rose; Share a Thorn

Each student shares a Rose, something good or positive, from the day or week; and a Thorn, something not-so-good or positive, from the day or week.

Four Types of Care

Students, during the check-in, take turns using the four types of self care graphic to describe strategies they are doing or would like to do to be physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually healthy.

5 Step Check-In Process

The teacher leads students through the 5 step check-in process described in Emotional Check-ins: Why You Need Them:

  1. Tune into your body.
  2. Take a deep breath.
  3. Ask the question. Use the simple question, “How am I feeling?” Make it even more specific by tacking on the phrase “right now” or “in this moment.” 
  4. Use descriptive words to capture how you feel. 
  5. Brainstorm what might be contributing to those emotions.

Then each student is given an opportunity to share what came up for them during the exercise.

Pear Deck

Pear Decks are very similar to a PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation. But instead of simply static, informational slides, you get to create Interactive Slides that let every student respond to your questions or prompts. Once PearDeck is activated, through the Google Slides add-on, students are given a code to access the Pear Deck. There they interact with each slide through typing, drawing, and using a draggable icon depending how the teacher set up the slide. What follows is the Pear Deck I used for a check-in at the start of one of my classes.

Create an Image Based Timeline of Feelings

Students create a timeline of images that represent: how you felt last week; how you feel today; how you want to feel this coming week; and finally, what strategies you can use to get to how you want to feel this coming week. Students then share their images via their webinar cameras and discuss their meaning with the rest of the class. What follows are (1) the prompt for this activity, and (2) sample student pictures:

Gif Image

Using Giphy students do a search for different feelings and emotions they are currently experiencing, and then select one or more Gifs that represent those feelings. They then take turns to do a screenshare of their selected Giphy and explain why they selected it.

Excited, Overjoyed, Very Happy

Padlet Check-In

Padlet is an application to create an online bulletin board that you can use to display information for any topic. You can add images, links, videos, text, and drawings. Below is a Padlet I created for an emotional check-in.

Mentimeter

Menitmeter allows teachers to engage and interact with students in real-time. It is a polling tool wherein teachers can set the questions and your students can give their input using a mobile phone or any other device connected to the Internet. Their input is displayed on a slide in a selected format: Word Cloud, Speech Bubbles, One-By-One, and Flowchart. In the case of check-ins, it can be used to have students put in responses to a question related to how they feeling at the start of class and their responses then are shown to the class via a slide. The example below shows a slide with a Word Cloud of emotional check-in responses.

Flipgrid

Flipgrid is a website that allows teachers to create “grids” to facilitate video discussions. Each grid is like a message board where teachers can pose questions, called “topics,” and their students can post video responses. For an emotional check-in, students record a short video about how they are feeling.