Training the Teachers of Tomorrow

Vision Empower conducted a one-day Pragya Teacher Training at National Institute for the Empowerment of Persons with Visual Disabilities (NIEPVD), Chennai for B.Ed college students with visual impairment.

28 B.Ed students and 5 D.Ed students were introduced to a new pedagogy of teaching Computational Thinking concepts to students with visual impairment through games (Project VICT).

The training began with a speech by Ms Sree Priya, Director of NIEPVD, Chennai followed by an introduction to VE interventions by Ms Sylvia Veeraraghavan, Director of Operations, VE.

Post this, the students were divided into 3 groups of 11 each.

Each group played a different set of VICT games to understand the key learning areas of numeracy and computational thinking that each game develops.

The first group played games based on early numeracy and reasoning like Pebble Counting, Pebble Grouping, I See 10, Last One Standing and the Market Game Group 2 played games based on spatial reasoning and kinesthetics.

These include Pebble Sorting, Collaborative Sorting, Sound and Music Patterns, Magnetic Pad, Tic-Tac-Toe and Simon Says.

The third group engaged in playing symbolic representation and code games like Connect, the Birthday Game and Feely Bag.

The B.Ed college students enjoyed the training and look forward to implementing this in the future as many of them aspire to become teachers in special schools for children with visual impairment.