Sangamam Kanini in Chennai City and Thiruvalluvar District, Tamil Nadu

Asha for Education Chennai’s focus has been government schools since it began working in the Chennai area. A focus area now is the use of technology to provide quality and scale. In recent years there has been an avalanche of technology aided learning material available for the classroom, both for teaching and evaluation. As with many schemes, technology hardware has been provided to schools without building capacity among teachers to select and effectively use the technology in classrooms. Oracle’s support has been critical to enable teachers to use technology-aided teaching in classrooms.

Read more about Asha for Education getting a $100,000 Oracle award for Science and Math Education in Government Schools here.

The project helps teachers get past the intimidation of using unfamiliar technology, and also enables children to get familiar with computers from a young age. Says head mistress Mrs. Thenmozhi of Thomur school, “we are now able to use computers to help teach our students. We thank Oracle on behalf of our entire school.” Head mistress Mrs. Lakshmi of Kuppammal Chattiram school says, “our children can now learn with audio-visual material. We are grateful to Oracle for their support.” Asha Chennai starts this project with 15 schools, with a plan to expand to 200 primary government schools.

“Asha Chennai has embarked on a project to create a scalable technology driven solution to address common problems plaguing government schools in Tamil Nadu” says Rajaram Krishnan, coordinator of the project in Asha Chennai. “Oracle’s timely support has enabled us to start this project. This has the potential to pave the way for a system and method that can be deployed across schools in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere.”

More information about two other projects where this award will be utilized: Science Education at Deenabandhu Teacher Resource Center and Science Education in H.D. Kote Taluk, Mysore district, Karnataka