Hi, Firstly, let me add one point here. Sarvangin Vikas Sanstha is formed to upgrade the educational standard in the rural area schools. Although we are motivating Open Source movement but it is not our main intension, but still we do believe that Open Source movement is necessary in the rural area schools. Hence, we develop open source CDs.
> I noticed from the website that the packages are all > Linux versions. We develop all platform independent softwares. So, our CD is useful on any platform windows or Linux. > What flavour of the OS is being used in the Dhule > -and other schools? The computer lab is arranged by ZP Dhule. All computers have Windows XP pre-installed on their systems. ZP Dhule has purchased thousands of computers directly from HCL. And HCL computers come with pre-installed windows XP OS. So we are providing them training on Windows XP. > Further, could you share some of the experiences you > have had with the schools, teachers, students and of > course the State's Education Dept. machinery, as well > as the challenges you have faced? This could prove > to be a model for replication in other States as > well. Its a very good question. As far as our Dhule project is concerned, the whole story is as follows: Dhule ZP, purchased thousands of computers from HCL. Since, nobody in the school was aware about computer usage there was a great need of computer training for the teachers. At the same time, in Indian Express there was an article about our Sanstha's work. One of the Dhule ZP member read that article and contacted us for providing training. We had submitted our quotation. You may be aware that Maharashtra state government has tie up with Microsoft for providing microsoft product training to the school teachers. Thus microsoft provides free training to the school teachers. Hence, ZP Dhule sent 4 school teachers to Pune and they got trained in the Microsoft computer lab. Later on these 4 teachers went back to Dhule and now they are providing training to total 583 teachers. The major drawback here was, the teachers were not provided any idea about what exactly to be taught to the school students. Here our CD played major role. We have included Gcompris games localized into the Marathi language. We gave demonstration to ZP Dhule. They got impressed and decided to purchased our 583 CDs. Since, our CD costs just Rs.35/-, the cost was not at all a concern for ZP. Our CD is simple Autorun CD. But installation of our CD was found difficult to them. So, it was decided that in every 12 days batch, one day somebody from our Sanstha will go to Dhule and demonstrate/train them on our CD. Every teacher will be provided one copy of our CD. The teacher will install our CD in the computer lab. Play it and later on install this CD in his school. In this whole project, we did not face any problem with the state government employees. In fact they helped us a lot. School teachers really appreciated our work. But one thing that we found was, the official training provided to the school teachers is on MS-Office and our CD has OpenOffice. So teachers naturally compared both the office softwares. Presently there is a big issue in Dhule ZP whether to choose MS-Office or OpenOffice. I must add here that the district "Nandurbar" which is very close to Dhule, is going to adopt the same training model. Now this time our Sanstha is planning to increase our involvement in this project. This is all about the Dhule project. Thanks. Regards, Anand 9422515760(M) ____________________________________________________________________________________ Bored stiff? Loosen up... Download and play hundreds of games for free on Yahoo! Games. http://games.yahoo.com/games/front -- ______________________________________________________________________ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List: ([email protected]) List Information: http://plug.org.in/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/plug-mail Send 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for mailing instructions.
