The Hindu : `Headstart' plan to be expanded

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jun 28, 2003

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`Headstart' plan to be expanded

By Our Staff Correspondent

BHOPAL JUNE 27. Madhya Pradesh would be taking a big leap forward by further expanding `Headstart', a programme for computer-enabled education, to 2070 more schools with the start of the new academic session from July 1.

A unique aspect of the second phase of Headstart, launched by the Madhya Pradesh Government's Rajiv Gandhi Shiksha Mission, is that the material used for the programme has been developed in the Open Source Software of Linux and is the largest Linux-based educational initiative in the country.

Headstart has been conceived as a programme for computer-enabled education and not for spreading computer literacy. It uses multimedia-based lessons to supplement classroom teaching. In the first phase launched in 2000, a total of 648 schools were covered under this programme. With its expansion to another 2070 schools, `Headstart' would become India's largest computer-anabled education programme at the elementary school level in rural areas. As part of the strategy to broaden the base, at least 50 to 60 schools at the middle school level get covered by this programme in each of the State's 45 districts.

To ensure the success of this ambitious programme, Rajiv Gandhi Shiksha Mission has equipped each `Headstart' class with three computers and a printer. Almost a hundred lessons have been prepared in 35 areas of learning and over 11,000 teachers given special training in computer-based teaching skills.

The educational software for Headstart has been prepared by a team of experts, teachers and software professionals catalysed by the Rajiv Gandhi Shiksha Mission. The multimedia-rich lessons focus on the difficult areas of learning, which are viewed as "hard spots''. While the lessons are designed for coordinated use with the school curriculum, one key feature is that it also encourages interactivity, self-learning and evaluation.

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