GIFT THE GIFT OF EDUCATION TO AN UNDER-SERVED GIRL

Literacy India has been working with the poor rural and urban communities for more than two decades, where children with weak educational foundation are forced to follow their parents, irrespective of school session schedule. We have strongly advocated technology aided education and now its relevance is more than ever. It is only with technology and specially designed software program of 500 hours that vulnerable and underprivileged children can be brought up to speed, given the situation.

Gyantantra Digital Dost has successfully been implemented by us to ensure out-of-school children as well as school dropouts, students weak in academics to get basic education for their better future and accelerate the learning process. However, with education centers and schools being shut, these children need devices to continue to push against the despair of the situation. The marginal communities cannot afford mobile phones or laptops, and this is the community which needs the crutches of educational foundation the most – not just to survive such unprecedented situation but also to ensure that the progress made by the country does not slip away. The COVID 19 pandemic has impacted each one of us, the severity of which is yet to unfurl. As the world braces itself for what lies ahead, the Indian Government still struggling to ensure the security of the future generation. One of the key aspects, education – especially elementary education - is at a critical junction as experts worry that the progress made so far, has since suffered. The recent migrant crisis and the continuity of schools being shut is a major blow to the 427 million children in the country. But especially impacted are children above 6 years of age, a critical age to create a essential educational foundation.

Literacy India has a robust solution to meet this monumental challenge. Not only do we have an intelligent educational software which focuses on individual learning capacity but also serves as a resilient and patient ‘teacher’. We started the project using Google Classroom with the children of these communities. Students made trained in Google classroom, assigned worksheets, assignments, recreational projects where these children can be engaged under the guidance of teacher.

  Activities undertaken during the quarter: 

• Community survey conducted to approach students and mobilize for online classes.
• Teachers training for capacity building on usage of technology in education
• Door to door Google classroom training for effective use of technology for the purpose of education and to bring the process on ease
• Awareness session on Covid 19 to safeguard themselves against pandemic
• Live Classes, developing assignments as per the level of students, sharing academic worksheets and online assessment to measure the students’ performance.
• Classes at contact center in full swing the fill the learning loss.
• Pre-Test ( Base-Line ) to Post Test( End-line) to ensure and access the learning level and improvement

Community Survey and Mobilization

 Most of the students enrolled are first-generation school goers. Their parents had smartphones but could not think of their usage for academic purpose. During lockdown, Literacy India teachers went for a community survey and approached the students and their parents and elaborated on the concept of a virtual classroom. Initially, the parents hesitated, but the teachers played their role efficiently and skilfully to bring students to the virtual classroom. Further, students were enrolled and provided training on the effective use of technology for education. They were trained in WhatsApp, Google Classroom & Google Meet to access the learning content.

Pre-test Evaluation 

The Pre-Assessment was conducted across the communities and each individual student participated in it. During the pre-assessment, we checked the existing knowledge of students and to what extent has the individual student progressed on the assigned syllabus. We categorically segregated the students “requiring improvement” and focused more on them to improve their learning gaps. 

Centre-wise Assessment of Topics (comparison of Baseline Data to End Line )  

To ensure students learn more meaningfully in the virtual classrooms, the academic team of Literacy India brought the concept of continuous evaluation to monitor the students learning level and take timely decisions in order to maximise a learners’ academic progress.  This process of evaluation was used for improving student’s achievement through detection and correction. It would detect child’s improvement areas and allow the teacher to discover specific learner’s academic gaps and provide them individual attention to enhance their academic learning levels.

 As a process , after completing a set of topics with students, the teacher conducted a test comprising of ten questions and evaluated children’s learning level, knowledge gained, and understanding developed for the topics taught. This helped the teacher to make a fair judgment on students' concentration level, attentiveness, understanding and retention about topics taught in the class.

Story of Change

Name- Keti ( Name changed) Location : Delhi

 Pre-Covid-19, half of the world’s children were already unable to read a simple text by the age of 10. School closures have deepened pre-existing learning disparities, within and among countries, due to inequities in access to technology

Keti ( name Changed)  Grade IV , 10 years old child among all who was also facing challenge to accomplish her academic proficiency as schools were closed  for long time.  She is 1st time school goers and shy by nature also. While she has been enrolled under the program found underperformer in every subject. She scored 6 marks out of 100 in language as well arithmetic. Several common topics in language  both Hindi and English like  nouns, pronouns, verbs, synonyms, one-word substitutions, and punctuation, simple  passages reading and attempting questions was not able to attempt. Similarly in Arithmetic Addition, subtraction & multiplication.

She engaged in learning through the program and attempted day to day as per assigned syllabus and lesion plan. she started responding by assignment and teachers observed  her interest and improvement. The teacher then attempted to explain this by involving Keti in an activity in which she could freely participate and learn in an enjoyable way. She used coloured chart paper and cut it into a balloon shape. She arranged the balloons in a group by pasting them together. Three identical bunches were created. Post attempting the each topic of digital Module , She clearly grasped the concept & improvement measured.

She received 54 out of 100 on the mid-test after three months of enrolment and finally she scored 92 out of 100 on the Post-test. From the pre-test to the final exam, there was an 84 percent improvement. She has completed most of her  curriculum assigned as per her age.

This is what her teacher said “She made excellent progress in both her academics and overall her personal development.  She is very attentive we wish her all the  luck in future to be the best”

Links:

• Sanjana the Rockstar - Story of an amazing 13-year-old girl

Established in 1996, Literacy India (LI) is a non-profit organization with the primary objective of providing quality education and skill training to under-served children and under-privileged women to empower and help them become self-reliant. To fulfil this objective, LI decided to build its programmatic approach on 4 pillars i.e. Education, Empowerment, Employability and Environment. These 4Es, like a beacon, help guide the organisation to bring about positive change in the lives of its target beneficiaries/ communities.

Literacy India has been advocating technology-aided education and enhancing digital skills for over two decades. In sync with the requirements of Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), Literacy India has pioneered the delivery of future skills training and engendering STEM aptitude among its students in an integrated education format. With the onset of 4IR the nature of jobs are changing, and so are the desired education and skill set this is also evident from the change in school curriculum as directed under the latest Education Policy by the Government of India i.e. NEP 2020.

The importance of an early interventions and introduction of NEP in the Middle and Elementary schools has been supported by a number of government and non-government reports suggesting that adopting a strong STEM background at an early age in the life of a student will encourage tech- empowered participation. This will help the country and its citizenry in reaping the early bird advantage as students proceed through middle, high school, and on to post-secondary education.

Literacy India has already set up Robotics &  Digital Labs in its schools and these laboratories serve as spaces that allow students to explore, experiment, tinker and create. Under the LI’s Future Skills project there are two component one, teaching fundamentals of coding Scratch, Python and second, creating Applications using MIT app inventor as well robotics introduced advanced Artificial Intelligence kit - WHALESBOT MODULE 2.0. This is introduced to the students with new components, sensors, processors, actuators etc. Programming software – SCRATCH is used for coding the Robots. Presentation on new Robotic Kit with videos were shown to the students like Gearing parts, structural parts, and appearance parts. Whales Bot Al Module 2 has more than 480 parts which function as gearing parts, structural parts, connectors, and appearance parts Children can build diverse teaching and competition projects upon these parts.These programs build competencies that allow individuals to solve complex problems in highly emergent contexts of action in a self-organized way and enable them to act successfully.

Meet Our Junior Coder

Name: Anu ( Name Changed)  Grade: VIII

Anu (Name changed) is a student of grade 8th in Literacy India Vidyapeeth School. She comes from a family where her elder sister studying Engineering with Literacy India support and she is also interested in studying science. Father is not supportive and mother is the breadwinner in family. Due to constant lockdown situation in 2020 and early 2021, the academic studies of children were conducted online through Google meet. Anu’s marks in Maths and science were not good when online exams were conducted in 2020. But after opening of schools in 2021 in the month of July she was enthusiastically looking forward to attending her classes. She was very excited to attend her robotics class because it is very engaging and was fun to learn & understand the concepts of science. She is a very creative girl and enjoys drawing. This creative skill helped her in designing the bots. She is one of the promising students of Robotics as per her teacher. She participates in all the activities of class, she understands the coding of bots quite well and has a knack of picking up complex algorithms with ease. Her interest in science subject has grown many fold and in last examination she scored good marks compared to previous exams. During her project presentation she has made a Catapult Robot and also participated in the School’s Independence Day’s thematic event of Robotics and made a Battle Tank prototype that was highly appreciated by one and all.

Links:

• Journey of Literacy India- People and Projects