Amidst the worldwide crisis every other university, school, classroom, and other centres of education have resorted to the online mode of transmission of education, through Google Meet, Zoom, Skype and other such video conferencing applications along with virtual boards like skribble.io which are a common sight at homes nowadays.
May it be a choice for electives, overall class feedback, or attendance, everything is taken up, on these virtual forms. Teachers and students alike are getting used to this novel method of teaching which is a marvel of this modern era, this would have been an impossible feat to accomplish 50 years ago, the ease and the outreach that technology has promoted is nothing short of extraordinary.
Classrooms have turned into Google classrooms, the blackboards have become computer screens showing changes being made thousands of miles away, the classroom chit chats now on WhatsApp, the classroom bench now a bed at the comforts of home, the lunches in the canteen, now is homemade food at the dinner table, the friendly faces of friends are now concerned faces of our parents, a new reality this world has stepped in all of a sudden. The pandemic has made researchers out of the most stubborn minds in the world, everyone wants to know what this virus is about, whateffects it poses, the symptoms, how can one prevent it from latching on to them, anything and everything about it.Studying online even though much more efficient, is a little distracting, as the notifications on different apps pop up all the time, promoting us to be less concentrated on the class and thinking about other modes of entertainment that we are used to on our laptops and phones. Classrooms until now were offline, on blackboards and paper notes, with books being the major source to study from but due to this pandemic, currently pdfs, presentations and screenshots are the way to go. The classroom environment is also no more, because our siblings and parents may distract us midsession. It is an erratic situation to be studying in right now, with no proper connection and less concentrated and comfortable environment to understand, and in turn, retaining information is proving very difficult. The absence of a change of scenery dulls the mind, the paranoia of the situation going outside house doors even more difficult to process. The pandemic is a desperate time, we should support each other now, but life must go on.