Engineering college faculty in Andhra to mentor govt teachers on IFPs, Byju’s app, Smart TV

Amaravati: As part of the first phase of the Nadu-Nedu programme, many government schools in Andhra Pradesh have been equipped with interactive flat panels (IFP), a crucial part of classrooms going digital. Soon, the teachers of the government schools will start getting trained by the faculty of engineering colleges on how to use the modern teaching systems including IFP, smart TV, Byju’s learning apps, and tabs in their daily classes to lakhs of students across the state.

Andhra Pradesh has now become the first state in the country to introduce digital classrooms in government schools. Currently, 10,000 classrooms across the state have IFPs. In the first phase of Nadu-Nedu, 15,750 schools will have IFPs by July 12 and in the second phase, 16,000 schools will be equipped with IFPs by December. Also, 5,18,740 tabs have been distributed to 4,59,564 Class VIII students and 59,176 teachers across the state. These tabs were developed by Samsung and contain preloaded content for which the state government has spent Rs 778 crore.

The School Education Department of Andhra Pradesh has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Ed-tech company Byju’s to provide quality content to government school students from classes 4 to 10, for developing the training modules, and imparting the training to teachers regarding technology-enabled teaching and learning through IFPs, Smart TVs and TABs.

For this project, two assistant professors/associate professors from engineering colleges in the state have been trained by the Commissioner School Infrastructure in the usage of IFPs and Byju’s apps.

In a statement given by school education principal secretary Praveen Prakash, he said that as many as 40 teachers will be trained per session during the first fortnight of July at each engineering college, for which the school infrastructure commissioner has already mapped the schools to be linked to the nearest engineering college on a statewide basis.

There will be in-person training programs for teachers in respective engineering colleges. After the training, students from every engineering college will go to schools for helping the teachers with everyday academic work, as part of their internship program.

Engineering college mentors

Each engineering college will function as a mentor institute for a set of schools in its vicinity and focus on ICT concepts. Later, students from the mentor institutes will be tagged to the mentee schools for onsite support for students and teachers for a month.

Recently, a workshop was conducted for 300 faculty members from 150 engineering colleges across the state and 26 Byju’s district nodal executives to familiarise themselves with the features of these digital devices.