Education for underprivileged children is imperative in reversing issues of healthcare, poverty, population control, unemployment, environmental degradation or human rights issues. In disadvantaged groups of Gujarat (including marginalized tribal and caste populations) only half of children are attending elementary education (1). We sent our Night School Digital Coordinators to see how things were at our Gujarati Night Schools.
At Barefoot College we are training our Gujarati Night School Teachers, in the municipality of Godhra, to create new teaching resources using iPads. It will take some time to adopt the technology completely, however; seeing some of the immediate results we are very hopeful.
“We’ve never seen this before, though have heard of ‘digital’ as a word but never knew this is how it can be used in educating kids. Our kids are enjoying this mode of learning. We’re tribals and we hardly get to see anything of this sort.” – Parent from Night School
“The best part of the training was when kids were shown one of the digital books made by their teacher using a solar projector in their classroom. After listening to the voice of their teacher recorded within the book, the class got excited and students started grasping many things from the book.” – Jaimini Luharia, Night School Coordinator
Using the Book Creator App, teachers can create their own interactive stories, or class programs using photo, video and audio recorded natively from their villages and engage students to learn and familiarize themselves with technology.
A big thank you to our CSR partners at ORACLE, without their support this could not have been possible.
References
(1) Status of Elementary Education in Gujarat
