Kerela’ ICT based education model has been winning accolades in the country. As the Central Advisory Board of Education has decided to adopt Kerala’s Information Communication Technology (ICT)-enabled education as a base model for other boards in the country
It is celebration time for e-content developers of two premier information and communication technology development agencies working in the field of school education funded by the State Government.
Their efforts have been identified as among the best in the country by the Union human resources ministry.
This clearly indicates that the ICT initiatives of the State are well ahead of other states.
Digital learning projects developed by the State Institute of Educational Technology (SIET) and IT@school have been lauded by different wings of the MHRD ministry.
The concept of dynamic e-textbooks developed by SIET has been approved by the Information and Communication Technology Project Monitoring group of the Union HRD ministry.
The Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) has decided to adopt Kerala’s Information Communication Technology (ICT)-enabled education as a base model for other boards in the country by including it in the national ICT policy on education.
The CBSE and ICSE streams will also have to follow this model once this becomes part of the National Policy.
The decision was based on the report of the subcommittee on National ICT Policy for Education recommending the Kerala model as the base model.
Former executive director of IT@school, K Anvar Sadath, who was the special invitee to the sittings of the sub-committee, told Deccan Chronicle that the committee viewed the major advantages of Kerala’s ICT-enabled model to be its decision to empower existing teachers to handle ICT instead of bringing outside IT experts to schools to handle Computer Science; use of free and open source software; the emphasis on academic perspective; and cost effectiveness.
While most states outsourced digital content through private vendors under the build, own, operate and transfer (BOOT) model, Kerala prepared its own digital content through Collaborative Content Development practices, Mr Sadath said.
SIET director Babu Sebastian said that in the first stage the textbook will be made available on the web portal of SIET.
At a later stage there are plans to provide the text books to computers provided to schools by the government.
The advantage of the dynamic e-text is that children can download the material from the e-textbook directly to a personal computer, laptop, mobile phone, or i-pad.
Tools like text, audio, video, graphics and animation will be used in the dynamic e-text book which is now in the final stages of development, said Mr Sebastian.
Using the e-text books students can listen to different topics using the ‘voice-over-text’ facility. It also uses animation sequences to explain scientific concepts and terms.
The textbooks will be designed in such a way that they are directly linked to dictionaries and an encyclopaedia, Dr Sebastian said.
Another specialty of the text is that it will have interactive tests at the end of each chapter. These tests will also be in the form of games, to sustain the interest of children in the topics they learn.
One of the attractions of such interactive test is that it uses sound effects and video clippings, he said.
