Principal's Desk: 'Virtual teaching can not replace classroom teaching'

Through the Pandemic, educators across the country have stood up as true leaders. Tough times never last but tough people do! And they don't come tougher than educational institutes! The educational institutes have stepped up to the plate like never before – fighting all odds, working all hours and learning new skills and technology on the fly as they honour their commitments to their students and parents. Education leaders seeing the unprecedented situation have swiftly unfolded alternative methods to avoid the disruption in the teaching and learning process and amid the sea of chaos brought on by COVID-19, they have managed to hoist new sails on uncharted waters. As bricks and mortar schools across the country face up to a global pandemic, virtual teaching becomes the panacea to combat all the educational issues. School management, an umbrella of facilitating learning and teaching, thus comes under limelight for the digital transformation.However, In the current circumstances, the online teaching learning process can only be used as a stop gap arrangement. It is a supplement to classroom teaching and not a substitute to in-person teaching. The virtual classroom cannot replace the traditional classroom because it is by its very essence or nature is not completely 'real.' Teaching on the Internet is teaching in virtual reality, but not in reality. The teachers are real! The students are real! The material is real! The atmosphere, however, is not real, and that is why virtual teaching cannot replace classroom teaching. Thus, just to minimise academic losses, we as the heads of educational institutes have started delivering knowledge through online mode and applications. However, with new age students who are hands-on with their tablets and mobile phones, the online teaching and learning process is seamless. Besides live online classes, technologies like Kahoot, Zoom sessions and Google Classrooms allow regular interaction with the teachers. The teaching staff has emerged as an equally proactive lot, who wasted no time to learn new technologies to instruct the classroom and give online lectures anytime.The teachers as well as the students have adopted the anytime learning- flexibility- decide on their time and pace. We as educational heads along with our dedicated team are continuously devising new online platforms to turn this new normal as more conductive and more effective. Thus, while the nation has rightly praised health care workers for their efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, there also stand the educational institutes who deserve incredible praise for helping children get through such harrowing times with so much sanity.