About 35 boys and girls of Class IX in a state government schools in Kerala are putting their heads together mapping the dimensions of a small stream snaking around the school. There is no boisterous volley of shouts, usual to any charged group discussion in a high school project, but only demure mouse-clicks.
But don?t be fooled, as the just-in-teens adrenalin is sloshing around with as much fervour as in any football field through the classroom?s online-chatgroup. While one girl is poring over Wikimapia and Googlemaps, another guy is scaling the CD of panchayat land records. In fact, using the school?s proud new handycam, the classroom group even made a short film on the stream. ?Priv?yet? (hello) whispers a lad to his benchmate in Russian, in another school in Kerala. ??Zatk?nis Po?zhaluista?? (Shut up, please),retorts the girl, who has also got the Russian Cultural Centre?s language feeds through Edusat?s Victer programme.
Learning foreign languages? And why not? Cyberspace classrooms are even pitchforking the Kerala schoolkid to the frontbenches of Asia?s education policymaking. What?s catching the eye is the low-cost model of deploying IT for education.
As many as 50,000 computers are in already in place. More will be brought in with high-speed broadband connectivity in a month in a project covering 12,644 schools in Kerala. This means that nearly 16 lakh school children in the state acquire IT skills every year.
Taking a peek at the schoolwork next doors, Srilankan government has consulted Kerala?s IT@School team for presentation. Chinese government too has evinced interest in trading notes. The Kerala model of using IT in classrooms was a talking point at Global Education Technology Summit?Asia Conference in Kualalampur.
??Actually, Singapore has equally good education infrastructure. But policymakers in other Asian countries complain that the licence-fee spend for proprietary software makes it nearly unaffordable for schools,?? says K Anwar Sadath, executive director, Kerala IT&School project.
While Kerala has no ban on Microsoft or any other proprietary software, FOSS (free and open source software systems) do get a free leg-up. For the schools, the state fine-tuned its own OS in Linux, helped by Free Software Foundation and migrated the school PCs en masse to Linux. Over 60,000 teachers have been trained.
Even the chalk-smudged blackboards are on their way out. Would the private school managements be caught napping as government schools breeze ahead with cybertools!
Bharatiya Vidyabhavan?s Kozhikode Kendra has signed up a five-year deal with Educomp solutions for supplying digital teaching aids like graphics to its schools. A single server will feed plasma TV sets in all classrooms. In the private school model digital teaching, however, the student will have to cough up extra Rs 900 in annual fee.
In the state government schools, its a participatary model that foots the hardware bill. Civic bodies, Funds of MP/MLAs, parent-teacher associations and philothropists come together to buy the hardware essentials. ??And it?s the content-making that?s been challenging,?? says Kerala education minister MA Baby.
In its latest feat, IT tools at schools have uncorked creativity in vintage storybook flavours in technology-writer S Achyutsankar?s Malayalam book, titled ??Idichakka Plamootile Rajakumari Tantram Padichatenginey?? (How the princess of idichakkaplamood grasped the code). The author trims the information gobblyduck to easily digestible ones and twos of binary system through a familiar children?s story.
Who would have thought that Rumpelstiltskin (of the old Grim?s tale) holds the key to the whole gamut of complex information theory! And the pricing too is just Rs 30, in keeping with the low-cost spirit that Kerala?s IT@School project radiates.
For the Kerala schoolkid?whose ink-stained satchel?s saving grace is just the high literacy index?, life an unending fairytale yet. Broadband connections and handycams have gifted her a life as incredible as the Cindrella story itself. And its her happy turn now to share this low-cost magic with the education planners of Asian countries.