On the information highway

Thanks to IT@School, students in Kerala will receive ICT equipment. The programme hopes to make as many schools as possible ICT- enabled.

Sajin, a student of Std. X, SMV Higher Secondary School in the city says he can hardly wait to receive the laptops and printers that would be arriving at his school this week. His school is one among the 360 schools across the district that would be receiving ICT equipment under the IT@ School scheme.

As part of establishing a complete ICT enabled educational system, IT@School , the technology arm of the Education Department has been providing ICT equipment to schools in the state since 2008- 09. This year as many as 360 schools across the district will be ICT enabled under the ICT@ School Scheme. The project facilitates ICT equipment distribution such as desktop computers, laptops, projectors and printers to the students.

The IT@School is joined by Keltron and the equipment is distributed from its divisional offices, said K. K. Sajeev, District Co-ordinator, IT@School. The data regard- ing the number of equipment required for each school was collected in December last year. Based on this 701 desktops, 538 laptops, 57 printers, 176 projectors and 60 UPS will be distributed to schools in the district. Companies such as Dell, Acer, Chirag are providing the equipment for this centrally funded project.

According to the officials at the IT @ School, the state wide implementation of the project operates through a strong network of 200 master trainers, 5600 school IT coordinators and 28,000 students school IT coordinators. The projects function completely on Free Software platform. As many as 50 lakh students and two lakh teachers covering 12,000 schools in the state have benefitted each year by the ICT enabled education.

The equipment distribution will be completed in three days. Since each coordinator has already undergone hardware training, they would be able to operate the machines.

The state wide distribution is expected to be completed by July 15, added Mr.Sajeev.

-thehindu.com