Access to Knowledge through Computer Education

India has understood the significance of computer education and trying to penetrate it at various levels both in urban and rural India. The computer penetration is absolutely essential for underprivileged children, adolescents and youth as well in order to secure a better future for them in terms of employment opportunities. Our Organisation has understood it and included computer education in their regular curriculum. The computer education classes are adding immense value to their educational need and quenching the mounting up knowledge thirst. Most of the children are first generation learners and now from literate title, they are reaching to e - literate title. Looking up all these advantages, the Organisation is bucking up the digital literacy among the children through regular classes of computer in its Upper Primary School.

Such education will be to a great extent build up a substantial communication channel with the world and children accessing will gain enormous confidence while using it. The parents have remarked that the children are getting interest in going to School and dropout rates are gradually decreasing. Computers are opening a wonder world to their life and they have started feeling themselves empowered to a level which they have never felt before. The teachers have incessantly trying to educate them on the benefits of digital education and explaining them that computer as a digital device is not just a tool for digital literacy, but a tool that impacts them socially, behaviourally, economically and perhaps even responsibly.

KSSN, an educational initiative of Sabuj Sangha has been acting to provide educational opportunities among disadvantaged children of Sundarban, since 2000. After spending a decade and half with success we realize that without proper computer knowledge their holistic development will remain unsuccessful as for a secured future digital education is important. There is hardly any school in Nandakumarpur in South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, India with computer facilities. As we are committed to ensure quality education for children of rural area, we started the computer classes for last two years from standard III to VIII. We find there are few students who are exceptionally very interested in computer classes.

This is a story of three bright children of KSSN. Sumana reads in class VII in our model school KSSN.  Her Parents are Satyagopal and Anjali. Her father works as a clerk in school and mother is a house wife. Sujan reads in class –VIII in KSSN. He is a boarder of the residential school of Sabuj Sangha which is operating to prevent the children from working as a child labour. His father’s name is Dilip and his mother’s name is Mita. He belongs to Kumrapara village, South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, India. These three children are very bright and enthusiastic students of KSSN. After spending a year in our Computer classes under the guidance of a special Computer Teacher, they are now comfortable in computer operating. They can work in MS word, Paintbrush and learned to access Internet as well. Sumana has started referring Google for some of the contents related to the subject of Science. Whereas Sujan loves to find out location of different countries from Google map. At present they are learning how to prepare a power point presentation. Our Computer Teacher is working hard with them to make them more efficient and skillful in computer. Students and parents are very happy and excited to have a special Computer Lab and Computer Teacher in their School.  Sujan and Sumana dream to pursue advanced courses in Computer in future. The overall students’ strength has increased 30% than the previous year as well. Sabuj Sangha is continuing its development journey through digital education and strengthening the Information and Communication (ICT) based technology among students.