Edu dept uses social media to keep students motivated amid pandemic

Tribune News Service

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Jalandhar, November 18

Since the pandemic has started, the education has gone online. The online medium also exposed the gulf existing between rich and poor when scores of government school students belonging to couldn’t even afford smartphones and their parents adopted several ways to buy it. Now, the Education Department with an aim to keep the students motivated, have asked the district education officers (secondary and primary) to ensure that the ‘storytelling project’ that has been started by the department through social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and twitter, should reach the students.

A statement in a circular read, “The stories that will be running on the social media are ‘Anni and Addu chat about Covid, when spots went away, and How Raju rescued Goldie’. The idea is to keep the students uplifted in these times. “They should be aware of the pandemic and not to worry about anything else,” it stated.

But not every student has an access to the social media sites. One example is that the Punjab Achievement Survey was started on September 21 and most of the students of a village couldn’t take the online test on the first day.

The Government Middle School, Mundi Cholian, Lohian block, has a total 131 students and 30 of them are residents of Dhakka Basti, a village 3 km away from the school. Of the 30, only five had smartphones. The village is situated near the Sutlej and most residents are involved in drudgery. Being aware of the financial constraints of these families, the head teacher of the school, Kulwinder Singh, visited the village on Wednesday along with other teachers and ensured that every student took the test.

This isn’t the story of this village only, almost every student living in remote areas have to go through these problems.