Telangana Education Department Empowers Teachers for Digital Tomorrow

The training was not your run-of-the-mill workshop but an experiential, simulation and highly contextualized one so that teachers didn't merely learn but lived through them

In a major step towards class room change and 21st-century skill building, Telangana State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) in partnership with Pi Jam Foundation successfully organized a two-day high-intensity capacity building training for state government school teachers. The focus was on equipping teachers with skills, attitudes, and methods to appropriately embrace and utilize the newly-released Digital Learning Textbooks for Grades one through nine, an innovative effort by the Telangana Education department.

Spread over two days, the training was not the typical workshop. It was immersive, experiential, and deeply grounded in real-life scenarios to ensure that teachers did not just learn concepts, but experience them. The objective was not only the acquisition of skills but also developing an attitude of thinking, problem-solving, and applicability to the lives of students. The sessions were deliberately scaffolded in a way that they were in close proximity with the digital content of the new textbooks so that the same energy, relevance, and depth could be transferred by teachers in classes.

The initiative of Telangana's digital learning textbooks is a milestone moment in the delivery of content and learning by students. To facilitate learning on a continuous basis and ensuring equitable access, the state will use telangana.codemitra.org an expert digital platform where parents, teachers, and students can learn from the same experiential learning modules. "The energy in the room was palpable," said a teacher who was present. "First time I realized how I can educate AI not only from screens, but also from games, stories, and the everyday life of our kids." - Mr. Madhusudan, Model School, Gundala, Yadadri Bhuvanagari

Highlights of the workshop were - simulation of real-world traffic scenarios by utilizing physical computing hardware such as LEDs and sensors to make the educators comprehend how real-world issues can be converted into coding exercises. The AI instruction that defined concepts like machine learning, data categorization, and bias in screen-free, tech-knowledged-free terms. The rest are - role-playing and team games on moral AI decision-making and algorithmic human biases, participating in intensive discussion and contemplation with design thinking sprints, where teachers addressed common school problems, empathized, and prototyped contextual solutions quickly. This project falls in line with Telangana's larger vision of developing curious, competent, and contextually aware learners who would be capable of contributing and succeeding in the world of tomorrow.