E-classes help students from village ace boards
In the lead up to the Class 10 Board exams in March, Amardeep Tudu, 16, son of a marginal tribal farmer in West Bengal’s Bankura district used to download audio lessons in physics from ‘cloud’ that his teachers in the US and Bengaluru uploaded for him.
The soft -spoken boy, who was compelled to migrate in search of livelihood as farm incomes dipped, was one of the 30 Santhal students from Chandra High School, whose teachers were located in different cities of the country like Bengaluru and Kolkata, and even abroad — in Phoenix and London. The entire batch passed the board exams, the results of which were announced on Wednesday.
The study material, which the students used to prepare for their exams was prepared by a team of volunteers who also uploaded the same on the cloud. They also taught the students how to download the material and held mock tests for them before the exams.
“On holidays we attended the classes by the distant teachers thrice a day -- morning, afternoon and evening. On weekdays, we attended the classes twice -before and after school hours. We got immense benefits especially in science subjects and English,” said Amardeep Tudu.
“Tudu who scored 80% overall with more than 80% in four subjects,” said Rajib Das Sharma, founder of project EducateOneKid, an endeavour that has pulled together about 20 volunteers based in India, the US and Europe.
The volunteers are engineers, school teachers, working professionals, senior students of premier institutes such as the IITs and IIMs. The project has been completely funded by volunteers.
“We were immensely benefitted by the project. In the absence of full-time teachers, we have para-teachers in the school. The professionals based in other cities helped us greatly,” said Dharmadas Tudu, the headmaster of Chandra High School, a 70-year old institution.
Though the school has Bengali medium students, the volunteers extended the help to the Santhali students who are from the fringe of the society.
“They imparted the lessons in Bengali. If any student had trouble following , we explained it to them in Santhali,” said the headmaster.
The project kicked off in 2013 offering help to 25 students in class 5. It provides books, bags, solar lanterns and other infrastructure including computers, Internet and projectors. This year the volunteers are focusing on creation of more audio and video content for the benefit of the students.
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