The Flinnt Blog : Ideas for Users

Can technology engage learners? YES, we are experiencing it through FLINNT.

Asia English School is one of the most prominent English Medium school of Ahmedabad city, pioneer in school and higher education. Established in 1965, Asia School has strength of more than 3000 students and 250 teaching staff. We also cater to a range of socio-economic classes, as a school we are committed to the job of ensuring that learners are not turned away because of their financial inability, through the medium of scholarships we ensure that deserving learners can complete their schooling.

The objective of giving this background is to bring out the fact that technology integration in a school like ours is often considered a very difficult thing, some of the oft repeated problems are:

Large classrooms.
Inability of learners to buy expensive IT devices.
Inability of educators to learn and use technology.

The progressive and consistent policy of the school has been to experiment with a number of different software, hardware and content distribution system. I should confess that every platform/school has failed to achieve the technology integration in the process of learning. The use of technology had been a mammoth task as most of the education software available in market is very complex and confusing.

Frankly speaking, attending the flinnt presentation by a group of educators from Ahmedabad was one of the normal activities for me like many such educational platforms that have mushroomed in current time. A 10 minute presentation of flinnt changed my perception of educational technology. I was well convinced the two specification of the platform “the easiest and most dynamic Edutech tool” for learning institutions.

I could not resist the implementation and easiest job was convincing my management as the annual cost was only Rs. 15,000/- but all my experiments with technology had made my teachers wary about my intentions. Their initial apprehension turned into enthusiastic welcome in a very short period of time because Flinnt is a mobile first platform.

I realized that the resistance from the educators was only because it was difficult for them to post resources and notifications from a PC, as soon as they could do it from their mobile phones and at their own convenience they adopted it willingly.

What we have achieved today is:

Each grade and subject has a closed private group.
Educators post learning resources prior to, during and after the unit have been transacted in the classroom.
Educators are free to choose the kind of resources they want to post, Math teachers post a lot of quizzes, social science teachers post links to happening in the society, language teachers post movie reviews, editorials etc.

As I understand we have just scratched the surface of what we can achieve through Flinnt, but that is the way we have planned the implementation. We want all our educators to feel comfortable using Flinnt, the 1^st years objective is to use it as a communication tool through which day to day notifications and simple learning resources can be shared. Later we hope to take it to the level of collaborative learning.

Earlier, technology in education was a debatable topic amongst the society. Everyone had their own views on modernizing education and making it technology aided. There were a huge number of positives and negatives to education technology. But, gradually as technology was embraced by the educational institutes, they realized the importance of technology in education. Its positives outnumbered the negatives and now, with technology, education has taken a whole new meaning that it leaves us with no doubt that our educational system has been transformed owing to the ever-advancing technology. Technology and education are a great combination if used together with a right reason and vision and ‘FLINNT’ the school communication platform helping in this transformation.

Technology is an increasingly important aspect of modern school life and has drastically changed the way teachers and students go about their daily activities. I can confidently recommend ‘FLINNT’ as it is easy as any social media and dedicated to life and learning. It provides ample opportunity for school heads to transform their respective institutions to learning centers of 21^st century.