BalaSwecha

BalaSwecha

BalaSwecha is an initiative of Swecha which aims at reducing the digital divide at the school level by introducing computer aided education. This initiative is supported by ThoughtWorks. This wiki shall be used to create a roadmap and to keep a track of the tasks.

Road Map

Current Status

• Associated with 12 government schools in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh
• Trained over 200 teachers during a course of two Teacher Training Workshops
• BalaSwecha OS is built on Ubuntu 10.04, to ensure it works on NComputing devices
• Pilot project to cater to students of VII and VIII grades, with minimal multimedia content
• Multimedia content sourced from various Creative Commons / Open Education Resources

Plan for the next six months

• Install BalaSwecha in 50 more schools, from the contacts gained through Teacher Training Workshop
  • Swecha GNU/Linux Users Groups to help in deployment and assistance
• Update the current distro from being based on Ubuntu 10.04 to a later version
• Update the distro with better multimedia content and increase the number of such items
• Update the distro with newer and better applications that help in practical approach to learning (like Step, a KDE app)
• Create a user-friendly environment

Tasks

Distro

• BalaSwecha should be updated to be based on a later version of Ubuntu, preferably an LTS release like 14.04
  • This should, however, not break the compatibility with NComputing devices
  • The latest versions of some applications, including Kalzium and Step, are not supported on 10.04
• The distro should be built to run on low-end systems
  • Many computers in these schools have less than 128 MB RAM