Laptops to the head of Govt.school
Rural Industries Minister Pongalur N. Palanisamy (second from left) at Government Higher Secondary School, Asokapuram, while distributing laptops to the heads of Government higher secondary schools in the city on Friday. Chief Educational Officer, S.Karmegam is also in the picture.“The progress of a nation is determined by the quality of education it offers,” Rural Industries Minister Pongalur N. Palanisamy, said here on Friday. Inaugurating a computer training programme for the heads of Government schools at the Government Higher Secondary School, Asokapuram, he said that Tamil Nadu was well on its path to progress with the Government schools too being brought into the fold of multimedia assisted learning.The heads of the Government, Corporation and Municipal schools were given laptops as part of the renewal of the computer literacy programme initiated by the Tamil Nadu Government in higher secondary schools in 1999.“Computers have become an integral part of learning, especially in higher education,” he said. Job opportunities were plenty and employers were on the lookout for qualified manpower, Mr.Palanisamy added.
The first phase of the programme covered 663 schools at the State level. Private computer companies were given the duty to run the computer centres at the schools and the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu was entrusted with planning, implementing and monitoring activities.Currently, the programme covered 1,880 schools in Tamil Nadu. The schools would be given eight terminals, one laptop, an LCD projector, a set of educational CDs and a 2 GB pen-drive. The teachers would be given continuous training programmes too.In Coimbatore, 98 schools were given laptops, the Chief Education Officer, S. Karmegam said. Of them 75 were Government schools, 16 Corporation, and seven municipal schools.
“We are planning to tie up with institutions of higher learning to conduct regular training programmes for the teachers,” Mr.Karmegam said.The laptops with Internet connection would facilitate easy administration, Mr.Karmegam said. Every school covered under the programme had been given e-mail addresses and the heads of the schools would be required to e-mail the staff and student attendance to the CEO’s office by 11 a.m. every day, he announced.This way, the governance of the schools could be made more transparent, he observed. All communications from the CEO’s office would also be sent through e-mail.
Though the facility was started with the higher secondary students in focus, the LCD projector could be made use of by the entire school.One room in the school would serve as an audio-visual room, where multimedia classes could be conducted for all classes, Mr.Karmegam said.The Wi-Fi compatible laptops would work on an advanced version of Linux Operating System.
