Gurugram-based Edtech startup, PlanetSpark announces ‘Live Online Training’ for school teachers to coach and guide them on online teaching methods and best practices. By introducing this training module, the Edtech player aims to help school teachers transition from traditional offline teaching methods/physical classroom environment to the virtual mode of teaching. The training sessions will be led by PlanetSpark’s senior faculty with extensive experience in online teaching, at the end of which all teachers will have to undergo an online exam called PSAT (PlanetSpark Aptitude Test), in order to become a “Certified Online Teacher”.
Under this training programme, teachers will undergo live online classes of 1 hour each for 3 days a week, in batches of 10. The curriculum covers 6 online modules covering Pedagogy, Technology Training, Classroom Management, Online Instruction, Student Engagement and Motivation, and Performance Measurement.
“PlanetSpark has pioneered live online learning and successfully trained thousands of students over the years. By virtue of that, we have gained significant knowledge on how to create effective learning experiences for kids in a live environment. All our teachers go through a structured learning programme on how to teach online.”, said Kunal Malik, Co-Founder, PlanetSpark. “We were approached by a few partner schools to offer the same programme to their teachers in the wake of Covid-19 and the sudden unprepared shift they had to make from physical classrooms to the online medium. We realized that this was a huge pain point for the teachers who had never taught online before and the pilots we conducted with them were very successful. Hence, we decided to make this training available to any school that wants to make this transition in an informed and structured fashion, as currently no such training is available for school teachers anywhere.”, he added.
“Schools are viewing online education analogous to moving a face-to-face meeting to a video conference. However, the online medium of teaching requires a complete shift in the mind-set and approach to achieve the ultimate goal of delivering a lesson effectively. We are glad that our experience has helped several teachers make this transition successfully and PlanetSpark is committed to extending this programme at a minimal cost to any teacher or school that is looking to excel in Online Teaching.”, said Maneesh Dhooper, Co-Founder, PlanetSpark.
With many schools making the Online Teaching Certification mandatory for all the teachers, this training by PlanetSpark comes as a much needed aid for teaching professionals, to train and upskill themselves in online teaching. The training also helps instil more confidence amongst parents by assuring them of the quality of education in the online classroom environment, which has so far been a cause of great concern for the parents’ community. The company sees this certification as a must-have in the post-Corona world and believes that teachers with this certification will be more employable in the near future. The training can be enrolled for on PlanetSpark’s live learning platform.