In the wake of the closure of schools till March 31 in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, the Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE) has come up with a novel idea of imparting IT training in online mode for over 81,000 primary teachers in the State through focussed intervention in 11,274 schools.
Traditionally, the IT training would have been conducted in three batches in over 1,000 centres with each centre having 25 teachers and two trainers.
High-tech facilities
However, in the online mode, the same training will be completed within five days by using high-tech facilities made available in schools.
The first part of the training will be held from March 18 to 27. The contents of the programme include measures to combat cybercrime and online safety.
Login facility
Earlier, KITE had provided the State’s first ever government-approved MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) model KOOL (KITE’s Open Online Learning) that enabled a flexible training platform for teachers without worrying about their teaching hours. Over 12,000 teachers benefited from the programme. Similarly, login facility had been enabled for all teachers in the Samagra portal.
“The special IT training has been arranged with the inclusion of necessary support files, video tutorials, resources and so on in the teachers’ login on Samagra to ensure zero quality loss, along with requisite monitoring mechanisms such as accurate online attendance,” K. Anvar Sadath, Chief Executive Officer, KITE, said. Teachers will be able to participate in the training programme either through self-learning using the available resources or through group study. Necessary support systems such as video conferencing with a mentor for a fixed number of schools, social media, and help desk for clearing doubts and monitoring have been set up.
Teachers will have to collate the training contents as in the module in digital format on completion of their daily training.
This will be inspected online by the mentors. The IT coordinators in schools will assist the headmasters/headmistresses.
Telecast
The KITE-Victers channel will telecast a special programme on the training.
In addition to broadband Internet in schools, a facility for the teachers to get digital resources on mobile phones will also be arranged.
It has been decided to provide specific vacation training to all primary and upper primary teachers during April and May as part of KITE’s E-cube English (Enjoy, Enhance and Enrich English) programme for improving English language efficiency.
The first day of the vacation training programme will feature a special test to ensure that only those teachers who successfully compete the online training programme will be allowed to attend the vacation training.
