Social media comes to Education department's rescue

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, November 19

Ever since the pandemic started, education has gone online. The online medium also exposed the gulf existing between the rich and poor when scores of government school students 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 platforms including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and twitter, should reach the students.

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

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

Government Middle School, Mundi Cholian, Lohian block, has 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.