School on phone: Mobile app helps students of Maharashtra’s Beed district take their weekly tests

Even as physical schools are likely to open only post-Diwali in Maharashtra, thousands of students from schools across Beed district are busy appearing for tests

Even as physical schools are likely to open only post-Diwali in Maharashtra, thousands of students from schools across Beed district are busy appearing for tests and assessments every week, with the help of a mobile application.

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A mobile application- Mazi Shala, which is a brainchild of a group of teachers in the district and is supported by the zilla parishad in Beed, has become a big hit amongst students in the district over the last several months. The application, which allows students to take weekly tests and use customized learning material as per their grade, has nearly one lakh, active users, at the moment.

Merely a few days after a statewide lockdown was imposed in March, teachers in the district got together to think of possible ways to move learning online. The application was one of the solutions that were arrived at.

“The local administration suggested we have a common platform for students across the districts. We thus decided to go ahead with a mobile application. I had some experience in creating apps and hence took up the responsibility of creating an application. Thus, Mazi Shala was created in the month of April itself,” says Sadanand Kulkarni, a computer scientist who works as a teacher at the Sharda Vidya Mandir, Georai, Beed.

So far, students have been administered over 20 assessments of various forms and formats through the application. In addition to the application, teachers in the district have also come together to form a bank of study material created for students in their context.

“While there are a lot of freely available videos, not all of them are factually correct and some also lack the local context. A group of teachers have thus come together to develop original videos and text content for each subject, which is gradually being made available to students in schools across the district,” said Somnath Walke, a teacher from the zilla parishad school in Pargaon, Beed.