CHANDIGARH — The teachers sat where their students usually sit. Desks, notebooks, the same fluorescent classroom light. For a few hours last week at Mount Carmel School, the lesson was on them.
The subject was artificial intelligence. The instructor was Janhvi Kohli, a certified professional in generative AI and cyber security.
The workshop she led, titled “Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation in Education,” was organized under the CBSE capacity building program. It ran in collaboration with Orange Publications. This was not a lecture about theory.
Kohli showed the educators how digital tools and AI could be used in real time — during a lesson, in a classroom, with actual children. The approach was learner-centred.
The goal was to build digital confidence among teachers who may have never touched an AI tool before. Why now? The answer sits in every school in Chandigarh.
Classrooms are still largely paper-and-board. Students carry smartphones but often leave them in bags. The curriculum demands 21st-century skills, but the people delivering it — the teachers — are rarely trained on the tools that define that century.
Mount Carmel’s principal, Dr Parveena John Singh, spoke about the importance of such professional development. She did not need to spell out the stakes.
Every teacher in that room understood the gap between what they were trained to do and what they are now expected to teach. The workshop’s core message was practical: technology is not a replacement for teaching. It is a tool.
Used well, it can make lessons more engaging. Used poorly, it is just another screen.
Kohli’s session focused on the first part — helping teachers see what is possible when human creativity meets AI in a classroom. For the families whose children attend these schools, the shift is real. A teacher who learns to use AI to generate quizzes, to create visual aids, to adapt a lesson for different learning speeds — that teacher changes how a child experiences school.
Not in some distant future. Next term. The CBSE has been pushing this kind of training for years.
Capacity building workshops exist on paper across the country. But the difference between a workshop that works and one that does not often comes down to the person leading it.
Kohli’s background in generative AI and cyber security gave the session a practical edge. She was not reading from a textbook. She was showing teachers what she does every day.
That matters. Teachers are skeptical of fads.
They have seen education technology come and go. Smartboards gather dust in many schools. Tablets bought with grants sit in locked cabinets.
What lasts is training that feels real — training that answers the question: “Can I use this on Monday morning?” This workshop tried to answer yes. The interactive format helped. Teachers did not just listen.
They tried things. They asked questions.
They saw how a lesson on history could be brought to life with a digital timeline, or how a science class could use AI to model a chemical reaction. The tools were not magic. They were specific, usable, and free or low-cost.
What remains to be seen is what happens next. A workshop is one day.
Changing how a teacher teaches takes weeks, months, and follow-up. The CBSE and Orange Publications have run similar sessions before. The real test is whether the teachers who attended last week will open their laptops on Monday and try something new.
For now, the room at Mount Carmel School held a group of educators who had become students again. They took notes. They asked for help.
They left with a sense of what is now possible — not because the technology is new, but because someone finally showed them how to use it.
{“@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “NewsArticle”, “headline”: “Chandigarh Teachers Learn AI Applications in CBSE Capacity Building Workshop”, “description”: “CHANDIGARH — The teachers sat where their students usually sit. Desks, notebooks, the same fluorescent classroom light. For a few hours last week at Mount…”, “datePublished”: “2026-06-27T09:25:00+00:00T09:30:00+00:00”, “author”: {“@type”: “Person”, “name”: “Sophie King”}, “publisher”: {“@type”: “Organization”, “name”: “InfoPulse Today”, “url”: “https://newsfeed.infopulsetoday.com/”}}
