Technology For Society

Focus on technology trends that create an impact on larger part of Society.

Computer Literacy for School Children


Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan seeks to achieve universalization of elementary education by 2010. SSA also seeks to provide Computer Education to bridge Digital Divide.

I am contributing to a session on Computer Literacy for School Children during Barcamp Bangalore 8 on Mar 7-8 2009. In this we will explore the status of computer education in Schools and discuss how to usher in 100% Computer Literacy for School Children. We investigate the status of the school education, the approaches to bring down the cost of hardware and discuss the key issues towards 100% computer literacy for school children. The presentation is given below

5 comments:

Arjun March 8, 2009 at 6:42:00 PM PDT  

The presentation at BCB8 was well received. The discussion highlights are given below.

Children are quick to learn and use mobile phones. The hole in the wall project of Sugat Mitra also proved that Children can learn on their own. I clarified that in that experiment, the study was focused on measuring the association of common icons with the task. I suggested for an in depth learning, instructor directed and computer lab kind of setup would be needed.

On the hardware for computer education, netbooks, Kindle was also mentioned as a candidate. We discussed how the smart phone and computer spaces are merging, with even traditional vendors in one market moving into the othermarket.

Several states are promoting English medium education from Primary or High School level in Government schools, to provide better opportunities from less privileged children. This may reduce the need for local language interface. But for real benefits to reach the rural children, the local language resources improvement is needed.

I suggested consulting the various references mentioned in the presentation and also the IDFC-SSKI research report on Indian Education , which analysed the market players, profitability and innovations in this sector. One important thought from that report was how the government regulations about not for profit nature of school education, is being transformed into a for profit model, using the concept of land/building/education as a service model.

Shree Kumar March 8, 2009 at 9:23:00 PM PDT  

You made a very good presentation.

Key take-aways
- a good survey of known activities
- good data collection
- useful links to govt reports. It's an eye opener that the govt is actually making all this data available. Publicising the existence and encouraging its use is now needed too.

Thanks for putting in all the work for the discussion !

Unknown March 9, 2009 at 2:16:00 AM PDT  

The session was really interesting as it addressed real problems in the process of teaching using computers.

The inputs from the group was useful
1. " The government gets lots of brilliant ideas from IT. But there is a lack of manpower(with IT knowledge) for implementation. The adoption of govt. schools by Universities/IT will address the problem effectively."
2. The lack of computer instructors for schools. The training for teachers will reduce the problem.
3. The lack of pre-school education for children in rural areas to be addressed.
I think the individual contribution will be of great help.I thank Mr. arjun for giving lots of info in small interval.

Mel September 12, 2010 at 8:06:00 AM PDT  

Thank you Mr Arjun for this valuable information.It is quite rare that you come across such an informative presentation on the current educational scenario. I am really impressed with the survey data.Was it a personal survey done or was it obtained from some other resource?

Arjun September 14, 2010 at 9:23:00 PM PDT  

Mel,
Thanks for your compliments. The statistics I used are gathered from published sources. The references section has the relevent links. Let me know if you need source for any specific info.

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