Training sessions were organised in Comptuer science and Maths for all teachers. Sessions for computer teachers were organised during the exam week on Sept 18th and 19th at Thiruvallur and for all teachers from Sept 24th to 26th in Olcott Memorial School.
Asha Chennai conducts a 5-day residential training for all its teachers in May. This is followed up by termwise trainings in Sept/Oct and Dec/Jan holidays. We recently held a series of training sessions. Further during the exam week the computer teachers cannot perform their normal work at the schools. During these weeks, the computer teachers come to the office. We try to have training sessions for the computer teachers during these weeks.
The week of Sept 16th was the exam week in Tamilnadu. Therefore on Sept 18th and 19th we organised training for all computer teachers in Thiruvallur. Since 20 of our computer teachers are in Thiruvallur, it was easier to organise it there. Asha Chennai has also started a new project with our sister chapter at Rajatalab near Varanasi, UP. The project there also aims to impart computer science education at government schools in that area. Three teachers have started working in that project and are going to 6 schools. They also came to Chennai for training along with their coordinator Suresh Rathour. Further computer teachers from our other projects Pearl, Thulasi and Poorna Vidhya also came for this training.
On Sept 18th the training focussed on how to use the Asha Kanini app for teaching general curriculum subjects to children. This covered general details on how to use this app as well as how to use the specific contents in various packages. The training was handled by Muthu as well as many of the computer teachers from the Sangamam project in Thiruvallur. Each teacher talked about the packages that they are knowledgeable in.
On Sept 19th the training focussed on how to teach computer science to the children. Three of our senior teachers, Kumari, Seetha and Rajkumari have been developing the curriculum and lesson plans based on the curriculum. They did most of the training for the new teachers. They were also informed about the Asha Impressions and also about what we look for in our computer science assessments. As part of this we also trained the teachers themselves on various things in the Openoffice Imrpess presentations as well as the Blockly and Scratch programming.
The training from Sept 24th to 26th was mainly for the regular teachers. The training sessions were all held at Olcott Memorial School. They graciously hosted our training sessions like they usually do. On Sept 24th and 26th we had Maths training by Mrs. Meena Suresh and Mrs. Kalyani from Ramanujan museum and centre for Math resources. They covered all topics in term II from classes 1 to 8. We have usually not been covering classes 6 to 8 in our training. This is the first time this is being done. All the regular teachers from all our projects attended the training sessions. Computer teachers from Sangamam and Poorna Vidhya also attended the sessions.
On Sept 25th the training was a repeat of the Sept 18th training. This was a training on how to use the Asha Kanini app and the contents we give with this. The training sessions were handled by Radhika and Kumari from Thiruvallur with some help from Muthu. Rajaram also gave general inputs to the teachers. This was attended by the regular teachers from Thulasi, Pearl, and Poorna Vidhya projects. We will handle this for the Sangamam teachers separately. Teachers from Olcott Memorial school and the Manigal project also attended these trainings.
Click here to see the photos from all these trainings.