Have you heard of teachers, mandal education officers working in Agency (forest areas) using WhatsApp and other social media for their daily official work? Have you heard of anything on e-schooling in the Agency areas?
Yes. These are happening in Rampachodavaram, thanks to the Integrated Tribal Development Agency.
The ITDA initiative, which has been going on in a small scale in the past few months, is set to take off in a big way from this academic year.
The ITDA created two WhatsApp groups - one for teachers and headmasters and other for field staff like mandal education officers, supervisors, cluster staff and girl child development officers-- about six months ago.
This initiative, the brainchild of a young project officer K.V.N. Chakradharababu, was successful in the second half of the last academic year. Documentation was done every day in the main server with photographs and quick action was taken immediately by the superior officer on the erring official.
“We have asked about 256 teachers and 100 field staff from both groups to send photographs of 127 tribal welfare residential and Ashram schools about their daily activitie, including morning yoga, assembly, lunch, evening snacks and dinner. At Revenue Division headquarters, we put four computers to receive data and analyse it three times a day,” Mr. Chakradharababu said.
The new system gave them feedback on issues after three months and officials started taking action on about 100 issues like quality of food, irregular supply of blankets to students, and failure to conduct extra-hour classes.
Apart from this, the ITDA took teacher training as second task for the fresh academic year. It has planned e-classes with Tata consultancy from this academic year and it is going to announce the project by next week.
However, it already started Activity Based Learning (ABL) for about 4,000 teachers of all 700 and odd schools in the entire 11 mandals in Rampachodavaram and Yetapaka Revenue divisions.
The ITDA has outsourced this training programme to the Centre for Development and Research (CDR) for ABL which has already trained about 1,000 teachers in summer vacations.
Bunker beds, dual desks
The ITDA this year has taken the initiative to give bunker beds and dining tables to students in the ashram and residential schools along with dual desks bought from the Rajamahendravaram Central Prison, made by prisoners.
“This year we are starting coaching for Eamcet from the first week of the academic year for inter first year tribal students. Last year we got 2 IIT and one Medical seats and this year 2 IIT, 5 NIT, 5 MBBS seats and cent per cent SSC Marks,” Mr. Chakradharababu said.
