Our journey with CS Pathshala.
Peter Drucker, the great management expert and educator,once said “If you want to do something new, you have to STOP doing something OLD !”
..and that is just what we did at Global Public School, Kochi, Kerala this academic year 2017-18 .
Global Public School, is a young twelve year old school, which constantly strives to implement learning to our students which will be relevant to them in their future years. Therefore , 8 years back, the IT team had moved out the fixed textbook concept, and reworked our content to ensure that age appropriate skills were imparted to our students. This had meant a huge paradigm shift for our teachers . Instead of being stuck to teaching WORD,EXCEL, POWERPOINT based on the version in the textbook, our teachers had to come up with a curriculum that would cater to the IT requirements of a child based on his/her academic requirements. We implemented our self developed curriculum which involved teaching Typing skills, Word processing across different word processors like Word, Google Docs etc and also had hands on work done in 3D Printing.
So when I came across CS Pathshala, it was a harmonious extension of our thought process. Here was set of people from the Industry who looked at Computers not as a subject boxed in by a PC, but who worked towards empowering students to see “Computing” in everything and at the same time included many of the aspects that we were doing.
So, what we did is, this year 2017-18 , my team took up the challenge of piloting the CSPathshala curriculum in totality. So from Grade 1 to Grade 8, we modified our curriculum to incorporate the CS Pathshala pitch towards teaching Computing as a skill. We played Sudoku, created route maps, talked of Euler’s and Hamiltonian concepts and found students asking for more. The structured powerpoints, lesson plans and the well thought out worksheets helped the teacher to have an active classroom. Of course we have made quite a few course corrections and been vociferous in our feedback, yet as the year draws to a close , we are happy to say that the CS Pathshala curriculum for Grade 1 to 5 has been successfully blended into our content and we really feel happy to have taken it up. The curriculum for Grade 6 to 8 has been tweaked at our end and we are still waiting to see how it can be moulded better to implement more Office automation skills and hands on applications.
The CS Pathshala team led by Vipul Shah and supported by Sonia Garcha and so many others are truly passionate in their commitment to revolutionise IT learning and it is my privilege to be part of this initiative
Susanna Sunil Vice Principal -IT,Systems & Communicaion Global Public School