Spoken tutorial for teachers

-  In a major venture to train 300 teachers from rural areas of Assam’s Kamrup district Assam Don Bosco University (ADBU) Guwahati teamed up with Rashtriya Madhyamik Siksha Abhijan (RMSA), Assam in conducting one-day training for five batches of teachers.

“I am particularly grateful to ADBU for extending its support in organizing the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) based training for the teachers of secondary schools of Assam,” said Mr. R. C. Jain IAS, Mission Director, RMSA, Assam.

The one-day training programme started on 27th May for the teachers of Kamrup (Rural) District which has about 300 schools.

Each batch has some 60 teachers attend one day hands on computer based training from 27th May to 31st May. It is expected that these teachers will in turn become trainers for the rest of the faculty in their own schools.

During the one-day Master Trainer Program, the participants are taught how to use the freely available eResource called the Spoken Tutorials developed at IIT Bombay.

The Spoken Tutorial project is the initiative of the "Talk to a Teacher" project of the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology, launched by MHRD, Govt of India, on the 26th of January, 2010.

The philosophy behind this project is that learning is more effective when animation and narration are presented simultaneously through a video.

The objective of Spoken Tutorial says ADBU Pro Vice-Chancellor and FOSS promoter Fr Joseph Nellanatt “is to assist a lonely boy or girl student in a remote village in the middle of the night to learn to a computer related topic by merely watching and listening to a video on the topic s/he chooses, without the need of any other person.”

The target group says Fr Nellanatt, “is the community at large, including school children, college students, working professionals, retired professionals, housewives, teachers, trainers, research scholars, software users and developers.”

The students can also test their knowledge by appearing for a free online test in a centre that is approved by the Spoken Tutorial Team. They will receive a certificate for their performance from the project team at IIT Bombay.

The Master Trainer Program will be continued for the rest of the districts after the training for the present batch is completed.