Kerala - Kochi   

IT education for upper primary students

KOCHI: The State government is planning to extend its prestigious IT@School project to all upper primary (UP) schools in the State.

As part of this, information technology (IT) training will be given to some 12,000 UP school teachers with a view to enabling them to introduce children in the 9-12 age group to the world of computers.

All government UP schools will be provided with two computers, a multimedia projector and a broadband internet connection. Most of the funding for the scheme will come from the Central government’s Sarva Siksha Abhiyan and the rest from the State government.

IT@School project executive director Anvar Sadath told The Hindu that the decision to cover upper primary schools was the logical extension of the current IT education at the high school level, which was now poised to enter the next stage — IT-enabled education. “The quality of the entire school education system can be improved by introducing IT at the UP level,” he said. “The ultimate aim of the project is to create an effective teaching mechanism by utilising IT as a tool and this can be achieved only by introducing IT in the UP level,” he added.

He said 12,000 UP school teachers would be trained during October-November. The 120 master trainers who currently work for IT@School and an additional 150 will train the teachers at workshops at 150 locations across the State. The five-day workshop will consist of four days of IT training.

Mr. Sadath said the project was aimed at introducing IT-enabled education progressively in the UP section thereby reaching about 15 lakh students who would make use of IT as an effective tool in the learning process. All the 53,000 UP teachers — in the government, aided and unaided sectors — would be gradually trained so that they would be able to utilise IT in teaching. (Of a total of over 53,000 UP teachers, 17,000 are in government schools and 32,000 in the aided schools.)

There are 3,038 UP schools in the State (955 government, 1,870 aided and 213 unaided schools).

The project had already been piloted in 38 schools and will soon be extended to 162 institutions before it goes full swing from the next academic year.

Most UP schools already have their own computers. These have been secured using funds from local bodies, local area development funds of MPs and MLAs and funds raised by parent-teacher associations and other donations.

However, a large number of these computers are underutilised and are not accessible to students because of shortage of trained teachers. Wherever possible, the computer labs of high schools would be made accessible to the UP sections also.

The IT@School, considered a model for the rest of the country, had won national recognition. Recently, the Central government had approved a five-year aid for extending the programme to all government-run and aided high schools and higher secondary schools in the State. The high school sector had shifted to the free software platform, ITSchool Linux. With the decision to cover all UP schools under the IT education programme, Kerala’s government-sector schools will be making a big leap in using IT in education.

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