Thaindian News

Thiruvananthapuram, Feb 20 (IANS) The Kerala government in collaboration with Intel Saturday launched a regional version of the Skoool Learning and Teaching Technologies educational website — an online platform to help teachers and students learn key concepts in mathematics and science.
Kerala thus becomes the first state in the country to deploy Skoool content in all schools.

The website (http://kerala.skoool.in/) can be accessed free on the Internet.

The online resource, an initiative of IT@School Project of the General Education Department of Kerala government, is designed specifically for students and teachers of mathematics and science, and provides resources in English and Malayalam to enhance their understanding of these subjects.

Peter Hamilton, the worldwide director of the Intel Skoool programme, said it is their goal to stimulate the use of technology in learning to benefit societies.

“We aim to help develop strong skills and supporting infrastructures around the world, and ready to use technology to help grow local economies and knowledge development in societies,” said Hamilton.

The Skoool web technologies are designed for use on all personal computers. Besides the web version, all schools in the state would be equipped with the offline version of Skoool content.

“As part of our various initiatives, we have customised free software based programmes such as Dr. Geo, Rasmol, K-Tech lab, Geogebra, Chemtool, Kalcium etc, which have been widely accepted by the teaching and learning community. We are looking forward to enhance the present teaching learning activities to a more enjoyable and exciting process and we believe Skoool Kerala content would enhance this process,” said K. Anvar Sadath, executive director, IT@School Project.

State Education Minister M.A. Baby, who was present on the occasion, said that a consortium will be established by linking university departments, affiliated engineering colleges, arts and science colleges, media institutes and other established agencies for developing and generating content appropriate for the new curriculum and for the ViCTERS TV channel.

Skoool Learning and Teaching Technology has received the United Nations World Summit Award, Golden Spider Award and the UK BETT Award.

IT@School Project is the techno-functional arm of the General Education Department of the Kerala government. It was set up in 2000 for empowering the state school populace by imparting Information Communication Technology (ICT) enabled education from the grassroots.

IT@School provides ICT enabled education to over three million students every year in the state. The project saw 0.2 million teachers empowered in ICT through a network of 200 dedicated master trainers and 5,600 IT coordinators.

IT@School is the nodal agency for implementing EDUSAT network and runs an exclusive channel for education called ViCTERS (Virtual Classroom Technology on Edusat for Rural Schools).