Empatico | Bringing the World inside our classrooms!

Last week, at Teach For India Chennai Fellow Durbar, I had an opportunity to share about the ways in which we can bring the experiences of World to students within their classrooms and my reflections on doing a similar project back in my Fellowship with a classroom in Bangladesh! Capturing the important points in this blog post.

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Link to the slides of the presentation: https://www.slideshare.net/aravindhanvalan/empatico-bringing-the-world-inside-our-classrooms

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Starting with my own story!

Empowering students as confident leaders — was one of the major areas of my classroom vision for Design Thinkers. I tried exploring multiple ways of providing the same, realized that confidence can come through academics-mastery on a specific skill or knowledge, the ability to inspire and also it’s closely associated with the exposure that we get. From my personal experiences, interacting with different people around the globe improved my confidence and opened up possibilities to hear new perspectives. With the spirit of providing a similar opportunity for my students, I tried bringing personalities from different countries around the globe for a quick talk at my classroom whenever they visit Chennai.

Towards the end of my Fellowship, I wanted to take this exposure avenue to one step further and had thoughts around how much impactful it can be, if students get an opportunity to interact students from other countries.

It can be powerful. Just imagine students not only reading about the culture of different countries but can witness it through their eyes, hear through their ears and feel through their heart. And what if it can be done at completely free of cost — is it even possible?

Yes, definitely. Thanks to the advancement of technology!

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Empatico is one amazing free tool which can transform the learning experience for students. It connects classrooms around the World and empowers teachers & students to experience an interactive learning beyond their classroom (and country). It naturally kindles the values of curiosity, kindness and empathy among the students and targeted on the age group of 7–11.

The Pros of Empatico

  1. Simplicity

The beauty of the tool is in the simplicity. You just require a computer with a camera and an internet connection. You’re more than ready to go!

2. Automation

The level of automation offered by the tool makes it much more exciting. Starting from finding a matching classroom, to partnering with your peer teacher in designing an activity, to scheduling a time which works for both the classrooms (based on GMT), to the real video interaction between the students — support for every step is already inbuilt on the tool.

3. Interesting hands-on activities

Complete lesson plans with broken down objectives amd activities for engaging the students is available on the tool — we can pick and use them directly. This makes it easier for the new teachers who don’t require to spend much of the time towards planning in this totally different context of learning.

More than all, the UI is aesthetically beautiful, primary students (and teachers) will enjoy using it and fall in love with the tool.

How does it work?

Sign up (for free) -> Meet your matching classroom teacher -> Connect both your classrooms -> Magic (and obviously, learning)!

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Coming back to the story!

With the vision to provide such experience beyond the classroom and to really try this out and see, I collaborated with Muhammad Ahsan Nahiyan from Teach For Bangladesh. We were connected previously through IEEE Young Professionals, the largest technology community in the World and through Teach For All global network.

Both Ahsan and I designed a very simple activity for a basic introduction between both the classrooms from Chennai and Dhaka, with students sharing about their name along with their ambition, their favourite sport, the one thing that they like about their classroom/ teacher/school/nation. We did a closing with both the classrooms in India and Bangladesh singing their own national anthems with full pride (which was also coincidentally was written by the same poet)!

It was a wonderful experience for both of us as teachers and the students — was lovely to see both the set of students in Grade 4 & 5 communicating with so much of confidence among themselves which is the value that I wanted to drive for my students.

There is a huge scope for collaboration between teachers around the globe especially through global communities like Teach For All, IEEE Young Professionals and technology tools like Empatico. When we expect our students to perform at a global benchmark, providing them with a global exposure is highly essential and adds up significantly to their values, especially empathy and self-confidence.

If you are an educator/ teacher/tech enthusiast, I would love to know your thoughts on this idea, and looking forward to suggestions on scaling it on much more classrooms. Please reach out for any help/ brainstorming/thought partnering, drop me an email (aravindhan.a@teachforindia.org / aravindhan.a.in@ieee.org)- let’s connect to connect the students across the World.

Aravindhan Anbazhagan

25, passionate and optimistic. Working for City Development at Teach For India Chennai and volunteering with IEEE Young Professionals. Educator & Instagrammer!

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