Samsung, an Indian brand, has introduced its new flagship global citizenship program Samsung Smart School at Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya (JNV) schools across the country. The CSR program, part of the Samsung vision of ‘Together for Tomorrow! Enabling People’, aims to create young leaders of tomorrow by giving less-privileged students in India access to the benefits of digital education and its own transformative innovations.
The program is being piloted at 10 JNV schools in its first year. Samsung Smart School have been set up in JNV schools in Varanasi, Gwalior, Raipur, Udaipur, Kangra, Sambhalpur, Faridabad, Dehradun, Patna and Dhanbad. Many of these schools are located in remote rural districts around these cities.
Every Samsung Smart School has two smart classrooms each of which is equipped with the latest digital infrastructure, including an 85 inch Samsung Flip interactive digital board that replaces the traditional blackboard, a 55 inch Samsung Flip that students can use to participate in lectures, quizzes, classwork and project work, and 40 Samsung Galaxy Tabs for students to use for self-study. In addition, the classrooms also have a printer, a server PC, a tablet charging station and power backup.
Through the Samsung Smart School program, students will be able to improve their learning abilities and understanding of critical concepts in the classrooms through interactive digital teaching methods that teachers have been trained on. The pilot at 10 JNV schools will cover over 5,000 students, of which 40% are girls, and around 260 teachers.
“We are very happy to have Samsung as our partner under CSR for digital education. The smart classrooms, as part of the Samsung Smart School program, are helping improve student participation and engagement. I am confident that a program like this will bring a positive impact in the society and become a benchmark for digital education for the future,” said Vinayak Garg, Commissioner, Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti.
“Samsung helps young people around the world gain access to better educational and learning opportunities. Samsung Smart School program strengthens our commitment to our vision of #PoweringDigitalIndia. This global citizenship initiative is closely tied with India’s development agenda and implemented in close partnership with the government to ensure wider reach and impact among less-privileged students,” said Partha Ghosh, Vice President, Corporate Citizenship, Samsung India.
Apart from the infrastructure support, Samsung Smart School will also enable digital learning for students in these schools through multiple touch points such as teacher training, providing meaningful and relevant educational content and equipping these schools with solutions for interactive and participative learning.
Samsung has provided digital content for all classes from Grade 6-12 as per CBSE curriculum to enable teachers to use these classrooms more effectively and enhance student learning through an interactive and immersive learning process.
As part of the program, regular teacher training has been built in to enhance the skillsets of teachers and to help them prepare a better plan for delivering textbook content in a digital, interactive learning format. These teachers, who are the flag bearers of the Samsung Smart School program, are making teaching fun, engaging and participative for students.
