At the end of term II, during the December holidays Asha Chennai conducted training sessions for its teachers in Computer Science, Maths and English.
Asha Chennai conducts training sessions for all it teachers in between the terms. We have regular teachers who work along with the government teachers in the various schools as well as computer teachers who teach computer science and regular subjects using contents on their computers at multiple schools.
Computer teachers typically cannot do their work during exams at the schools. So during the last week of Term II, at Thiruvallur, we asked all the teachers to come to the office and do other work like mapping the contents to the curriculum, develop curriculum for computer science etc. On 20th and 21st of December we had detailed training session for all the computer teachers. We also invited computer teachers from other projects of Asha Chennai including Pearl, Thulasi and Poorna Vidhya to come and stay in Thiruvallur and attend the training. The teachers from Pearl and Thulasi projects were hosted at the homes of two of the Sangamam teachers. It was heartening to see the developing teacher to teacher contacts between our projects. The training covered the following:
- The contents we have provided along with the Asha Kanini app and how to use them in class.
- Curriculum for teaching computer science for all classes 1 to 8.
- Asha Impressions competition and how to organise the student teams and what we look for in the projects.
- Computer science assessments.
As some of the Poorna Vidhya teachers could not attend this we also gave a separate training session for them in Chennai on Jan 9th.
On Dec 26th we had Maths training by Mrs. Meena Suresh from Ramanujan Museum and Centre for Math resources at the Olcott Memorial School. It was attended by about 60 teachers from all our projects as well as Olcott Memorial School. While the session had the usual contents of how to teach various lessons in term III, Mrs. Meena Suresh also talked about some specific topics in detail like conducting various classroom activities for teaching multiplication and division, how to handle weak children or slow learners in the class, etc.
On Dec 28th Mrs. Jayashree Arun, a volunteer and a senior school teacher at PS Senior Secondary School conducted English training at Olcott Memorial School. It was once again attended by about 60 teachers from our projects as well as Olcott Memorial School. She showed how to transact lessons for the children with the help of several sample lessons taught by our teachers. She also showed the teachers how to use the ELS kits that we have been distributing to the schools in Thiruvallur.
On January 4th, 5th and 7th our lead teachers from Thiruvallur Mrs. Radhika and Mrs. Nathiya travelled to Kayathar to train the teachers from our Pearl project. They repeated for the benefit of the Pearl teachers the points made in the Maths and English training sessions earlier. They also trained them on some of the other practices we have been following at the Sangamam project.
Click here to see photos from all of the Computer training sessions in Dec and the Maths/English session at Olcott memorial school.
Click here to see the photos from the training given by Radhika and Nathiya at Kayathar for the Pearl teachers.
Click here to see the photos from the Poorna Vidhya computer training on Jan 9th.