Perception of government teachers on digital tools and edtech platforms

Abstract

In the 21st century, technology has entered every aspect of human lives, namely health, infrastructure, food production, education, etc. Technological interventions made our lives easier and better. Education is one area in which the role of technology has been gradually increasing in the past years. Digital education is the incorporation of modern technologies and digital tools to assist teachers and improve students' learning. The idea of digital learning is not entirely new and was even present earlier. When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted us, most schools and colleges adopted digital education as a temporary alternative to tackle the absence of face-to-face offline classroom teaching. As the adaptation of digital education grew, the benefits were visible. Learning became interactive & engaging, and education expanded beyond textbooks and classrooms. Students could easily access a lot of information and no longer faced any barriers in finding information. The students had a personalized experience and learned at their own pace using digital tools. But there was a downside to the increasing importance of digital education. The students and schools of rural India need to catch up in competing with their urban counterparts in terms of digital learning. Government schools are especially struggling to adopt the new learning system. Government schoolteachers habitually use a blackboard to teach the children rather than relying on videos or online tools. And most government schoolteachers have no clue about using digital tools in the classroom. After COVID-19, they were asked to leave their digital phobias aside and were expected to quickly transform them into virtual teaching mode. The teachers had access to various digital tools but did not know how to use them. Unless the teachers know how to make the best of digital learning, they cannot help the children with the same. The adaption and use of the digital tools in education even has a very wide heterogeneity across the states and within the schools of the same state as well. While there are students in urban government school who were about get digital education during covid, there were students going to the schools in tribal areas, where the education has come to a complete stop due to covid. 5 Through this study, we would like to understand the perception of government schoolteachers on various EdTech platforms and digital tools. We also plan to figure out their challenges and develop recommendations to make the digital tools and EdTech platforms much more helpful. To better understand and work within time constraints, we restricted our study to the government schoolteachers of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana states. The other reason for selecting these states was Andhra Pradesh government has brought in many reforms to improve digital learning in schools.