Arunkumar G, Director and Founder, Newton’s Apple Public School shares his views on Blended Learning and Flipped Classroom

“Before asking a question or some interactive item, the teacher needs to feed the content to the students’ brain,” says Arunkumar G, Director and Founder, Newton’s Apple Public School in an interview with Pratik Ghosh, Content Writer, ArdorComm Media Group at the ‘New Normal – Education Leadership Summit & Awards 2023’ #ELSAChennai #ELSATamilNadu

How are you feeling to witness The New Normal Education Leadership Summit and Awards in Chennai?

Yeah, I enjoyed a lot and from other speakers, got some input as well. It is very useful, and this kind of summits need to happen at least really once.

Can you tell about your institution, how you are implementing technology in terms of educational pedagogy?

Let me introduce my institution. It is Newton’s Apple Public School situated in Malayanur near Dharmapuri. We follow Chrysalis, and we are using it. Now we are kind of looking for new platforms, basically. So that’s one of the reasons I came for this summit and visited all the stalls and pretty useful. We’ll discuss with the board members and design here.

What’s your take on the Blended Education concept and the flipped classroom model which is coming up?

Blended education is nothing but you will have both offline and online. So, you will have an offline classroom that will stay, but, end of the day, teacher can give an online access course or online material which students can use. So, that too, kind of, the teacher might, if possible, they can give some personalized content for students, but it’s not the must. But they can give some online materials to continue the learning at home. That is Blended Education. Flipped education is kind of you are giving some content pre-content right, it may be full content or whatever right to the student and next day classroom, students will come prepared. Okay, prepared or they know what is going to get taught.

So, the main advantage of flipped learning is that classroom time is in-person time. That is very crucial, and we need to use the most out of it. Mostly, it should be spent for interaction. So, teachers should not be spending time to teach something or some content. So, before asking a question or some interactive item, the teacher needs to feed the content to the students’ brain. So, they will be spending most of the time for that. So, the actual interaction or participation or collaboration, that is very less usually, but this flipped education enables that. Teachers can spend more time on this, so that’s a very advantage. That’s why when the moderator asked me if you become an Education Minister, what do you do? I will Implement flipped education, so we’ll enable them.

As you can see in this kind of forums where we bring in the education Leaders, the EdTech players as well as the government. So, how does this kind of forum benefit the education sector?

Yeah, the first thing is you will get to know the latest trends, what’s happening in our school. So, usually, schools operate in isolation, and there is less collaboration opportunity for collaboration is very less. So, these kinds of summits enable them to collaborate with others, and they will get to know the latest trend and technology whatever available. And participation from the government also enables us to kind of they will also understand what is the trend going on.

What message do you want to share to ArdorComm Media Group?

Yeah, it’s a nice preparation. I would say it’s perfect, and well-organized, and will expect more Summits like this at least early once.