Google had recently announced that they are partnering up with CBSE to train teachers across India.They said that their plan was to train over 1 million teachers using their apps such as G Suite and Google Classroom.
To support people living in poverty, Google also announced a huge grant of $1 Million to Kaivalya Education Foundation (KEF). With the help of these, KEF can work with other organizations and will be able to train at least 700,000 teachers to deliver virtual education for students, so that they can attend their classes from anywhere in the country
Sapna Chadha, Senior Country Marketing Director, Southeast Asia and India, Google stated: “We will train over 1 million teachers across 22,000 schools by the end of 2020 to deliver blended education”. This was just an announcement and we are yet to receive a follow up to it. However, one can’t help but speculate as to how this will happen.
Past Attempts by Google
This isn’t Google’s first foray into education. Their now discontinued Google Teacher’s Academy, also used to do a similar thing, except on a worldwide scale.
The Google for Education ( under which Google Teacher’s Academy operated) uses various apps and programs at their disposal to provide ground-up training for the teachers. Once a teacher completes his/her training, they get a certification from Google. Now those teachers could go back to their schools and impart the knowledge to other teachers. Though a bit unorthodox method, this surely was an innovative method.
How it may work now?
This is how the partnership would probably work out. As CBSE has a great number of teachers at the school level, they can get enough teachers for Google certification. Maybe Google may teach a certain number of teachers personally, who would continue teaching the course to other teachers in their school. This method is similar to the past, however, they didn’t had tie-ups with various school boards in different countries.
By this way, Google can easily reach its 1 Million mark by the end of 2020.
What is ‘blended learning’?
Blended learning, what Google says they will impart to their teachers, is a style of education in which students learn via electronic and online media as well as traditional face-to-face teaching. This means that technology becomes a big part of classrooms and teaching. Students can sit in their homes and can get the same quality of education if they had come to school.
Online resources could be used, and thus one wouldn’t need to memorize excessive stuff. This can make students more innovative and will make them curious about more emerging technologies.
Read More:Google for India: Google to invest Rs 75,000 crore in India
The Reliance Investment
Also, one can’t ignore the investment made by Google in Reliance Jio Platform. They might be looking at piggy banking on Jio Reach as well to impart training to CBSE. Jio Glass might come in handy but we are still awaiting details about the road map that Google might follow to impart training.