They take to social networking, to teach

A group of teachers create a virtual classroom where assignments and doubts are posted.

A screen shot of www.edmodo.com, a Social Network Learning to teach Functional English.

When a group of professors in Kozhikode found that they have lost their students to Facebook and Twitter, they did not try to wean them off the Net. They decided to join the fun and launched Social Network Learning (SNL) to interact with students in a virtual classroom.

On an exclusive education portal, >www.edmodo.com , the SNL covers over 3,000 students in 100 colleges under Calicut University.

According to the teachers who worked behind the initiative, the network links urban, semi-urban, and rural colleges under the university. It now deals with only informatics lessons for BA Functional English students (the syllabus has been uploaded), but more subjects can be added.

In effect, it works like Facebook, with added features. “Through the platform, students can be given assignments online and they are encouraged to submit them as posts through the same medium,” says M.E. Premanand, Associate professor with the Department of English at the Malabar Christian College, Kozhikode.

Prof. Premanand, who was instrumental in forming the network with his teacher friend V.G. Prasanth five months ago, adds that students can check their grades instantly and clear doubts with teachers. The professors say that signing up with the network will enable a teacher to contribute online lessons, conduct polls, quizzes, or post important learning topics for discussion.

They can monitor the time each student takes to respond to the assignments and give them timely feedback. As “edmodo” has wider applications, it can be easily accessed by students and teachers on their mobile phones with Internet connection. A feature that attracts teachers to SNL is that they have a common platform to contribute. Parents too can sign up with the community if they want to monitor the virtual classroom performance of their children. Prof. Premanand and Prof. Prasanth said that the idea was to make teaching, be it in virtual or real world, entertaining.

“We have seen many evolutions in our classrooms, from ‘chalk-and-duster’ to the latest video-conferencing,” they point out.