BalaSwecha

BalaSwecha is an initiative of Swecha which aims at bridging the growing digital divide in education at the school level between the privileged and underprivileged. BalaSwecha is a complete learning platform which introduces computer aided education and virtual lab environment to the schools.

Teachers in the Government schools are not well equipped with technology. Hence they are forced to follow the traditional teaching methods. BalaSwecha gives them an opportunity to teach with the help of multimedia content and the students to explore the subject with the help of the applications available.

The applications in BalaSwecha create a virtual lab environment where the teacher/ student can conduct their experiments and explore the concept beyond their textbooks. It helps in increasing the inquisitive thinking among the students. The students will be exposed to a huge platform where they can explore and learn while conducting experiments.

BalaSwecha is a tool which is built to compliment the teachers than to replace.

Swecha conducts a series of workshops for the teachers from the Government schools on BalaSwecha across Andhra and Telangana states. There are around 300 teachers till May 2015 who had attended the workshops.

Teacher Training Workshops

Teacher training workshops are conducted twice every year. One during the summer vacation which includes teachers across the Andhra and Telangana. The other, during vacations like Dussehra / Pongal where teachers get long holidays.

During the teacher training workshop, the teachers are introduced to computer aided teaching. The workshop has sessions from introducing computers, to using the applications to create a virtual lab environment.

The chapters/ topics which needs imagination of a 3 dimensional view and is difficult to teach the students using traditional teaching methods, applications/ multimedia will help the teachers in explaining it better.

The BalaSwecha team collects the feedback during their interaction with the teachers and works on on it during their next release.

Current Status

• There are 3 major workshops conducted across Andhra and Telangana states.
• Around 300 teachers took part in the workshop from 100 different Government schools.
• Among them 56 teachers are using BalaSwecha in their schools.
• The rest are unable to use BalaSwecha due to various reasons like lack of electricity / computers in the schools, old/ malfunctioning computer hardware etc.

Smart Teacher Training Programme

Education aims at making children capable of becoming responsible, productive and useful members of a society. Knowledge, skills and attitudes are built through learning experiences and opportunities created for learners in school. It is during the early school-age years that children begin to use the tools of their society with competence. In our culture, that typically means learning to read and write, calculate, and investigate. Children use books, writing instruments, and tools for studying scientific and social concepts. As digital technologies increasingly become the tools, technology is embedded into students’ lives, and students generally have positive inclinations toward technology, but the actual use of these devices in academics remains low, despite their increased prevalence. Information and Communication Technologies have recently gained groundswell of interest. Their nature has highly changed the face of education over the last few decades. For Complete details of Smart Teacher Training Programme

Developers’ Corner

Applications are developed in HTML5/CSS3, JavaScript and jQuery. The code can be cloned/ pulled from the Git repo here. The user interface extensively uses QtWebKit in addition to the above in order to communicate with the Operating System and also to provide a unified interface to access different applications. Follow the instructions below to setup your machine to contribute in development:

Current Status

• BalaSwecha is equipped with more than 100 applications and multimedia content.
• The multimedia content has been mapped to the 7 and 8 standards.
• The User Interface is made easy to browse where all the applications are grouped according to the subjects and topics.

Work under construction

• Module/ framework based approach
• Creating a platform for teachers where they can communicate their experience and also upload content that they have created/ translated.
• User Interface to be made responsive.
• Pulleys application - <link to git; git readme.md to contain description of the app>
• Building a website for BalaSwecha
• Ways to reduce the install size of Balaswecha - preferably multimedia content should be separated from the applications. This shall help in reducing the install time.
• Including teachers manuals’ for every application.
• Coming up with different ISO which suit different environments (primarily DE).
• Photosynthesis application.
• Extending the human atlas application to suite animals and microorganisms.

Docs

• Balaswecha Teacher Training Document

Field Work

BalaSwecha has made its place in more than 100 schools across the two states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Students and IT volunteers along with teachers play a major role in taking BalaSwecha to the schools.

Swecha has more than 150 GNU/Linux User Groups (GLUG) set up in engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The students from these colleges choose government schools around their colleges and help the teachers set up BalaSwecha lab in the schools.

If you are interested in taking BalaSwecha to a school, please fill in the details of the schools here. So that we could keep a track of the schools and also intimate you as soon as we have a new release.

Here are the instructions to install BalaSwecha:

Current Status

• BalaSwecha is installed in 103 Government schools across Andhra and Telangana.
• More than 56 GLUGs’ are taking part in taking BalaSwecha on to the ground.
• Around 80 volunteers from different GLUGs’ are taking part in this activity.
• Every Saturday IT volunteers are involved in implementing the BalaSwecha in different Government schools.

Going Forward

• Develop applications and multimedia content for grades VII - X, targeting Mathematics, Sciences, Social and Languages if possible.
• Tie up with other organizations with similar vision
• Pitch BalaSwecha to the Government which is a free and open source (no licensing cost).
• Translate the content to the local languages.
• Taking BalaSwecha to the Global South countries.
• Porting BalaSwecha on to open hardware which will be much inexpensive.