This month, May’23, we had the privilege to connect with 56000+ educators across the country and beyond as a part of the professional development sessions hosted by De Pedagogics for Microsoft as their Global Training Partner.
Thank you Microsoft Education (India) for this amazing opportunity
Minecraft Education is a game that has become very popular among students and has been increasingly used in education as a tool to promote creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving. In April 2023, De Pedagogics, an edtech company in India, organized an Earth Build Challenge in Minecraft for students from schools across India.
The challenge required students to work in teams and build something that expressed how they were feeling on that day. The challenge aimed to provide a game-based learning environment that students love and encourage them to think creatively, collaborate with their team members, and solve problems.
The response to the challenge was overwhelming, and De Pedagogics received over 160 innovative projects from schools across India. The projects were judged based on creativity, innovation, and relevance to the theme. The top 8 projects were announced as winners, including one Grand Prize winner, five National level winners, one North East region winning team, and one South West Central team. The winning teams will receive specially designed Minecraft badges, and certificates of achievement.
The challenge was not just about winning, but also about participating and learning. All participating teams received a special challenge participation E-badge and email signature badge. This recognition provided them with a sense of accomplishment and pride in their work.
As a part of the ‘Climate Future’ challenge! 👏 We’d like to 🎊congratulate 🎊 the
🏆Grand Prize winner 🏆
Dhirubhai Ambani International School, Mumbai. Team leader: Tina Peji
🎖️ National level winner 1 🎖️
The Ashok Leyland School, Hosur Team leader: Shanmugaprakash
🎖️ National level winner 2 🎖️
Crimson Anisha Global Schools, Pune, Marunji, Pune Team leader: Satyaprakash Pankaj
🎖️ National level winner 3 🎖️
Reliance Foundation School, Lodhivali Team leader: Prashik Tyade
🎖️ National level winner 4 🎖️
Sat Paul Mittal School, Ludhiana Team leader: Damandeep Kaur
🎖️ National level winner 5 🎖️
Dhirubhai Ambani International School, Mumbai Team Leader: Sudipta Pal
🏅 North East region winning team 🏅
Knps Phagwara – Kamla Nehru Public school, Phagwara Team leader: Sharda Pullabhatla , and
🏅 South West Central team 🏅
Dhirubhai Ambani International school, Mumbai Team leader: Roopa Mathur
for their exceptional work!
The April’23 Earth Build Challenge was a great success, and it encouraged students to showcase their creativity and imagination in a game-based learning environment. It also promoted collaboration and problem-solving, which are essential skills in today’s world. De Pedagogics is now looking forward to another exciting challenge in May’23, and students from schools across India are invited to participate.
In conclusion, the Minecraft April’23 Earth Build Challenge by De Pedagogics was an excellent opportunity for students to showcase their creativity and imagination. It provided a platform for students to learn and develop essential skills while having fun playing Minecraft.
We hope you had a blast showcasing your skills and connecting with others in this game-based learning environment that you love!
De Pedagogics has been dedicated to nurturing education for the past 8 years! Our commitment to this mission has led to many achievements in the education industry. It’s great to be 8 and a good time to reflect on our journey as a part of our anniversary celebration.
Here are 8 achievements that we are proud of:
Passion: At De Pedagogics, we are driven by a passion for education. This passion has led us to create programs and initiatives that inspire teachers and students to pursue their goals and make a positive impact in their communities. This year we are on a mission to Skill-up and drive passion for education.
Empowerment: We believe that education is a powerful tool for empowering individuals to achieve their full potential. Over the past 8 years, we have worked tirelessly to empower educators with the knowledge, skills, and confidence they need to succeed. Thanks to Microsoft Education, HP with Intel and Adobe for giving us the opportunity to empower educators across the country.
Inspiration: Our dedication to nurturing education has been a source of inspiration for many students, faculty, and staff. We are proud to have played a role in inspiring the next generation of leaders and innovators. This year we focused on inspiring students and teachers to learn the essential skills of computational thinking, coding and STEM thinking, using AI to think creatively towards solving problems to make a positive impact in their world.
Collaboration: Building strong partnerships and working collaboratively with others has been a key factor in our success. We have worked closely with other organizations and individuals to create programs and initiatives that have had a positive impact on the education industry. While mentoring over 500 schools to become Microsoft Showcase Schools, to #ReinventTheClassroom with HP and Intel and to cultivate creativity with Adobe Creative Cloud, meaningful collaboration has been the key.
Innovation: We are committed to innovation and to developing new approaches to teaching and learning. Over the past 8 years, we have embraced emerging technologies and methodologies to create programs that are engaging, effective, and relevant. As we nurture innovation and cultivate an extraordinary crop of ideas that point the way to a brighter future for all, we are very mindful of educating the digital natives about the nuances of online safety and promoting digital ethicates.
Growth: Our dedication to nurturing education has led to significant growth in terms of student empowerment, faculty development in partnership with Microsoft, HP and Adobe; writing relevant content for Cambridge University Press, aligning curriculum for schools to include new pedagogies and technologies and the drafting of new programs and initiatives to build future ready schools. We are proud to have played a role in helping students and educators grow and succeed in our overall goal of nurturing education. It is always upwards and onwards for us as we move forward on our mission!
Resilience: Building and growing a successful company in any industry requires resilience, perseverance, and a willingness to adapt and overcome challenges. Our ability to weather the ups and downs of the past 8 years is a testament to our resilience which we could not have imagined without our amazing team members and education leaders who place their trust in us. While COVID-19 and other crises reshaped the future, our team focused on spearheading the critical conversations and actions needed to drive change in the most inclusive manner.
Positive impact: Our work in the education industry over the past 8 years has had a significant and positive impact on the lives of many education leaders, faculty, and staff. We are proud to have played a role in helping individuals, in both private and public sector, achieve their goals, make a positive impact in their communities, and shape the future of education.
In conclusion, the past 8 years have been a journey of passion, empowerment, inspiration, collaboration, innovation, growth, resilience, and positive impact for De Pedagogics. We are proud of our achievements and look forward to continuing our mission of nurturing education for many years to come.
Multiple reports have confirmed the reading loss that has happened over the last two years and now is the time to define the road to recover the loss. We, at De Pedagogics, have been in conversation with school leaders, teachers and students to gain insights into what could be the best suited path to progress. Post much deliberation, research and considerable thought, here is a Road to Recovery that we would like to offer as a solution.
The first step towards recovery is that of knowing the unknown, gaining an understanding about exactly where the gaps are. This can easily be done using HP Literacy Attainment Coach that used eye-tracking technology and benchmarked rapid reading assessment to determine a student’s reading ability and gain deep insights into specific areas of difficulty to inform personalised intervention
HP Literacy Attainment Coach, a research-based diagnosticliteracy assessment solution uses artificial intelligence and eye-tracking technology to assess the reading ability of a student to gain a detailed insight and an objective overview of how lockdown has impacted literacy levels.
In a matter of minutes, this entirely computer based assessment uses powerful eye tracking technology to monitor a child’s spontaneous eye movement whilst reading. This enables a teacher to quickly analyze the 6 key reading components – reading speed, comprehension, decoding skills, letter recognition, phonological awareness and much more and design targeted intervention towards the same.
A secure, cloud-based platform, uses machine learning models to perform a powerful statistical analysis on each child’s individual eye movement patterns. The algorithms have been trained to make precise correlations between these patterns they are able to immediately determine a child’s reading attainment percentile within our normal distribution curve.
Results show reading attainment as a percentile across five coloured levels and provides recommendations for intervention to help tailor programmes to both support and challenge all pupils inline with their reading level. As a part of the detailed report, teachers are provided with the Lexplore score and providing an absolute measure of their progress. This score can easily be aligned to existing reading level frameworks and guided reading schemes results and is aligned with the UKs’ most successful reading scheme, The Oxford Reading Tree.
Over the last few months since its launch, Reading Progress in Microsoft Teams has helped educators check reading fluency more frequently and therefore differentiate more powerfully to support students on their fluency journey.
Reading Progress is free and built-in to Microsoft Teams Assignments and works on all platforms that allows students to build their reading fluency skills through teacher assigned reading assignments. Reading Progress keeps the focus on practice and growth, not performing under pressure and provides teacher a holistic view of trends and data including accuracy rate, correct words per minute, most challenging vocabulary, mispronunciations, omissions and insertions.
Educators easily track and share data and insights through integrated, interactive dashboards. These help them identify specific fluency challenges and create a custom learning experience for each student. To become successful readers, students need quality reading practice. Through its collaboration with Microsoft, ReadWorks has provided high-quality texts from its online library of over 4,600 passages, which will help teachers more frequently monitor their students’ reading in Teams.
The teachers can map the Lexplore score to the Lexile score mentioned in each of the reading comprehension pieces in Read Works passages. This allows teachers to assign passages based on data provided using AI and eliminates subjectivity. Additionally, the Recovery Curriculum Guide to Reading provides teachers tips and advice to help you review your resources and re-establish an effective reading routine.
Overtime as students progress on the road to recovery of the reading loss and gain reading fluency, the students can be tested again using HP Literacy Attainment Coach to measure the success and realign the reading goals. With regular testing schools can closely monitor reading and ensure interventions are having the intended impact.
According to OECD research, reading for pleasure may provide the most effective way to level social change and it is in fact a more important indicator of academic success than a child’s socio-economic background. We hope to offer our Road to recovery model to provide a systematic approach towards transforming a child’s whole experience of reading.
We would like to continue our conversations with schools to address the reading challenges as we believe that ‘a reader today, tomorrow a leader’.
After leading a session on Deep Learning Pedagogies at the Microsoft in Education Global Forum in Dubai, Meenakshi sat down for a deep chat with Anthony Salcito about what she has she been doing to transform the entire learning process.
Whether your school is learning remotely, adopting hybrid learning, or adjusting plans as you go, you won’t want to miss these new features—all designed with the current education systems in mind. For example, are you looking for help nurturing social and emotional wellbeing outside of the classroom, or need information on deploying and managing Teams for your school or changing up your Teams assignments? Check out new features organized by these topics, plus additional ones. You’ll want to bookmark this blog!
In the spring semester of 2020, schools were forced to pivot to remote learning due to COVID-19. The questions that arose also prompted system and school leaders to reexamine education in broader terms.
Barbara Holzapfel, VP Microsoft Education, addresses some of the shifts that are happening right now. She also highlights key findings in a new whitepaper titled, “Disruptions and Opportunities: Lessons from the spring of 2020.” Have a look at this blog, which includes links to additional remote and hybrid learning resources.
Schools around the world made an abrupt turn educational delivery in the spring of 2020. As with any major disruption and change—there’s a lot to be learned.
This report details the research findings of nearly 800 educators and IT professionals working in education, about the positives and negatives of the shift to remote learning in spring of 2020. It explores topics such as the benefits of being “unwittingly prepared,” disadvantages of being underserved, critical lessons learned, and managing the load for educators, students, and IT professionals.
Classroom discussions might look a bit different online, but dialogue amongst students is an important part of learning. Watch this video for clear instructions on how Teams participants can utilize the full functionality of the Raise your hand button.
How can we take what we’ve learned about the rapid response to remote learning and apply those insights to our current models as well as future schooling?
In this webinar, Microsoft Education VP Barbara Holzapfel leads a discussion with Michael Fullan and Joanne Quinn, Global Directors for New Pedagogies for Deep Learning. Both Fullan and Quinn believe that the disruption and reopening of schools sets a ripe environment for meaningful discussions and action to reimagine the future of learning. Listen to this thought-provoking webinar.
As the global crisis of COVID-19 begins to abate, Microsoft is working closely with education systems around the world to support transitions to the next stage of schooling. This document outlines how the new technologies implemented during the crisis can continue to be used to support transitions back to school and to improve and reimagine schooling going forward. Most countries will continue working towards full connectivity distance learning readiness during the transition back to school to ensure all students have connected devices for seamless learning. These efforts will ensure all students can participate in distance and hybrid learning should school closure be necessary again.
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