Coimbatore: The school education department will soon be employing apps like Google Maps along with conventional maps to teach geography to students from Classes VI to X.Tech-aided map learning will enable students to pinpoint the exact location of a particular place, department officials said. Teaching with the help of apps that are already installed in smart phones will help students understand the subject better, an official said.After a pilot project conducted in 10 schools in each district, the app-based learning programme under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) will be introduced in 32 government high schools in all districts. “The pilot project showed positive results from students. The trained students demonstrate better in mapping-related activities when compared to the others,” a senior official with the department said.The students will be taught about direction, time zones, GIS/GPS, remote sensing and graphs, a teacher involved in the pilot project said.Conventional maps will be continue to be used and exams will be held using them.Teachers said they had come across Class IX and X government school students, who were not even able to locate the state capital on a map.But there is a difference of opinion among the academic community on tech-aided learning. “Using apps requires just typing the name of a place enabling the device to pinpoint the exact location. This makes students more like passive participants. In conventional maps, the student would go through the entire map and locate places. In doing so, he would also get to know about nearby places and a sense of distance and direction. Gadgets would minimise the efforts put in by students and thereby limit their role,” said a teacher of a government school.Those welcoming the new method said conventional maps do help, given the teaching is done properly. “At present, students end up memorizing places on the map rather than understand the geographical landscape. In many schools, teachers do not have sufficient time to teach maps and often maps would be taught only during the examination,’’ said a geography teacher.The project will also help to simplify the job of teachers. “Several geography teachers have degrees in history, civics and economics. Such teachers find it difficult to teach the subject. This will help such teachers also,” said M Grena Janet, a teacher at the Government Girls Higher Secondary School at Ondipudur. “With the help of digital maps, we would be able to locate our continent, country, state, district and even the school just by zooming into it. The things that we had to imagine to understand the subject better, is shown to the students.”Educationalist Prince Gajendra Babu said that though introducing technology was good for the students, they should not substitute the fundamental learning process. “Students should be taught with basic tools like atlas and wall maps for better understanding. It is only on later stages, technology and electronic gadgets should be introduced. When the technology is substituted for fundamental learning process then it would turn disastrous,” he said.

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