The Staff of Junior School attended a Demo and Training Session by Extramarks services on 16 September 2021. Extramarks is an educational technology company that sells online and offline schooling and curricula. They cover all the categories of education from Classes K-12. They work on the tested pedagogy of ‘Learn – Practice – Test’ which encourages students to go through effective training. The organization continuously works on innovating and improvising itself to provide 360-degree educational solutions. It also offers training to the teachers.
The speaker from Extramarks, Ms. Nidhi Soni presented the curriculum of Class –KG and all the subject content including Conceptual Skills and Art and Craft.
Taking the example of Kindergarten, the resource person elaborated how their content could be used to teach Phonetics with stories, rhymes, phonetic sounds, writing practice, etc. There is the ‘Learn and Practice’ feature with worksheets. The same pattern has been used for Hindi and other subjects and classes.
For each and every class, the portal covers all subjects. The content is aligned with NEP 2020. There are three parts in the content–
1) Learn –concepts with audio – visual content
2) Practice –worksheets with questions and answers, NCERT solutions
3) Test –objective and subjective questions for taking tests
In the second session, Mrs. Kusum Rao explained about the assessment pattern used for Classes K-12.
There are three features available –
1) Launch a Paper by teachers
2) Blending of questions by the teachers or by Extramarks
3) Layers of proctoring
The teacher can launch a paper which can then be attempted by the students. Evaluation can be done in three ways-
1) Fully automatic – System generated
2) Semi-automatic – System generated as well as teachers’ questions can be added
3) Manual
Monitoring the students during the test via their webcam is an excellent option given in Extramarks. IDs will be provided to the teachers and to the students. Students can upload their photo ID. The proctored exam cannot be open without the camera.
After the exam, the parents and students can check the result online. For each and every wrong answer, the correct answer is shown with proper explanation. MCQs are autocorrected and subjective questions are marked manually. For each and every question, marks and comments can be given. The marks of students with maximum violation of rules can be withheld and not released.
Overall, the features and content given by Extramarks is user friendly for the teachers as well as the students. They have covered the content given in NCERT for all the subjects. The assessment pattern is really good with a bank of questions which can be used accordingly by the teachers.
The teachers had a good opportunity to not only learn a new platform of digital learning but also had an interactive session of analysing the content and features available in Extramarks.
