TIRUCHY: Day and night, a government school teacher has been converting lessons into videos to help his students learn better. While parents struggle to keep their children engaged in studies amid the lockdown, it is quite different for those who admitted their wards to a government school in Tiruchy district. With video lessons, exercise books and children’s books, the students of this school are well-equipped to study from home.
Thanks to R Gurumurthy (42), a teacher in the panchayat union primary school in M Kalathur near Thottiyam, even students from nearby villages are seeking admission in the school. The teacher has also been praised by locals for bringing more admissions to the school.
“I have already made videos for the Tamil Nadu government’s SCERT Tamil-medium textbooks from classes 1 to 5. However, when the books were changed in 2018, I had to start anew. Now, as I make the videos, I am sharing them with the children,” says Gurumurthy.
He has completed all videos for Class 1 and video for Class 5 Social Science. “I started with class 1 but as class 5 students would be leaving for middle school, I decided to finish that first for their sake,” he says.
For his videos, Gurumurthy scans YouTube or other sites to find what best suits the lessons in textbook. He then arranges them line by line and does the voice-over as the video plays. “Around 10 like-minded teachers from all over Tamil Nadu have been lending their voices to the videos. Before lockdown, I even had a few students do voice-over for some videos, like for when there were conversations in the lesson between characters.”The videos are uploaded on to his blog — www.guruedits.blogspot.com — one by one for students and teachers from other schools to use. Gurumurthy has also made DVDs and shared them with students, and started WhatsApp groups to share new uploads.
Apart from videos, the teacher has compiled booklets for classes 1 to 5 for Maths and English. These booklets are of 20 pages each. The English booklet mostly has phonetics and meanings of new words while Maths contains formulae, methods, model problems and some exercises. The booklets were ready and distributed even before the textbooks were delivered to government schools earlier this month. Along with this, Gurumurthy also presented his students with colouring books, crayons and works of fiction.
“Our students are well-versed in English phonetics and they also read Tamil very well. So, they would need little help in reading English text.” Gurumurthy has admitted his children to the same Tamil-medium elementary school where he works.