The IT@School Project, launched four years ago in Kerala, has remodeled conventional teaching methodologies in classrooms through the use of Information Technology (IT). Over 40,000 teachers were given 90 hours of training on IT skills, and computer labs with 10 to 60 computers have been made available in all high schools in the state.
IT@School is a project under the Directorate of Public Instruction of the Government of Kerala, which introduces IT in high school education for qualitative improvement of the conventional teaching and learning system. IT@School has developed an operating system based on the Linux version Ubuntu. The project, called IT@School GNU Linux Version 3.0, was distributed to 2,666 high schools in Kerala.
The project is implemented by a three-tier system of administrators. In the largest deployment of 'free-and-open' software in India, over 15 lakh schoolchildren from classes 8, 9 and 10 have started taking their quarterly IT practical tests on PCs running a special version of Linux.
The practical examinations commenced on September 7 and will end on September 22. The project has created a whole ecosystem of computer-aided tools for self-paced learning, online testing, instant evaluation, marks generation and so on. All this is done using royalty-free open source software.The State’s path-breaking e-learning initiative Akshaya had raised popular expectations, but the cost of proprietary software licenses in bulk was unaffordable. This led to the State emerging as a pioneer in the use of Open Source resources in a host of education and e-governance projects.
In July 2005, Kerala was the first State to use the Edusat satellite channel to connect schools in all its 14 districts under the Virtual Class Technology on Edusat for Rural Schools, or VICTERS, program.
There are no comments on this article yet. 
