Arunachal Pradesh today became the first state in the country to launch a web-based educational programme for all schools in collaboration with Google.
Christened as Chief Minister Global Education Programme, the education system would initially be launched in 50 to 100 schools of over 7,000 schools in the state and later extended to others in phased manner.
The system is a solution built for teachers and students through Chromebooks to bring the power of the web into classroom. The system would provide free productivity tools to simplify and save time with classroom, Gmail, documents besides providing thousands of teacher-approved apps, books and videos through laptops and tablets.
“A new era of technology has begun in Arunachal Pradesh through which we can connect with advanced nations of the world,” Chief Minister Nabam Tuki said while formally launching the programme here in presence of Team Google India representatives and officials of the education department.
The new system would be beneficial for those students who could not go to schools so that they could learn from home, said Tuki. Stating that the new concept would be a flagship programme of the state government, the chief minister exhorted the officials of the education department to work hard to make the programme successful by setting a target.
On November 15 last year, Tuki visited Google headquarters, Mountain View, California, on an invitation by the company for the Google Global Education Symposium on Ministers and held talks with the Google Education team
Highlighting various problems associated with the education system in the state, Tuki sought ideas from Google on how to improve and also impart quality education to each and every student without any bias. The chief minister stressed on the importance of improving the standard of the teaching fraternity and asked Google to impart training and know-how to the teachers in the state and bring them at par with international standard.
Google had agreed to make detailed Arunachal specific report and project, and bring in solutions keeping in mind the local issues associated with it. “The system will help expanding educational opportunities by providing every student in the state with access to a computing device and a web connection,” Sumit Gwalani, Chrome OS product lead (Asia Pacific) said.
Elaborating on the system, he said, through this, educational resources could easily be published, curated and shared by educators worldwide, so the best content was available to everyone on multiple devices at the lowest costs. “Students, teachers, parents and even digital pen pals can work together, communicate across boundaries and learn from each other through the system,” he said. He said, open technology could transform education and improve learning for everyone everywhere. “Google classrooms will give teachers more time to teach and students more time to learn,” he added.
