Vijayawada: With the aim of raising the educational standards in government schools and shaping the students of these schools into world-class performers, Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy has set up a high-level working group to realise the aim.
Senior officials and representatives of global tech companies would sit together and finalise curriculum, infrastructure, resource deployment, learning content and labs requirements for government schools. The working group has been asked to submit its report by July 15.
Principal secretary to school education Praveen Prakash issued GO MS 51 on Sunday on the formation of the working group.
The working group would be headed by the school education principal secretary and consist of the IT secretary, school education commissioner, Samagra Shiksha project director and SCERT director apart from Ashutosh Chadha from Microsoft India, Shalini Kapoor from Amazon Web Services India, Shweta Khurana from Intel Asia Pacific, Jaijit Bhattacharya, president of the Centre for Digital Economy Policy Research, Dr Archana Gulati, ex-adviser to Digital Communications, Niti Aayog and representatives of Google and Nasscom.
The school infrastructure commissioner is named the convener.
The government wants to ensure that government school students are given proper training in emerging and future technologies. They must acquire knowledge of high-end technologies during their education and gain top-notch posts at international level after completing the courses, it was stated in an official release.
Expertise in emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Lord Language Models (LLMs), data analytics, ChatGPT, Web 3.0, augmented reality, virtual reality, internet of things, centre back digital currency, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing and gaming is aimed at, for these students.
The panel would make suggestions on developing suitable curriculum, lesson plans, methods of training, requirement of labs and human resources to help students gain perfect knowledge in these subjects.
Officials explained that as a result of the reforms introduced by the Jagan-led state government, 41 lakh students are pursuing English medium since 2019-20. In tune with this, students were given bilingual text books of science, mathematics and social studies under Jagananna Vidya Deevena in 2020-21. Labs were also established to help students improve English language skills.
In 2021-22, students of Class VI to X were given Oxford dictionaries while students of Classes III to V were given pictorial dictionaries. Subject-teacher concept was also introduced starting from Class III.
The state government also initiated steps in 2022-23 to ensure that all government schools get CBSE affiliation. It entered into an agreement with the Byjus for providing audio-visual content to the students in mathematics, social and science subjects to make the learning easier. As many as 5,18,740 students of Class VIII were given Byjus-Content loaded tabs.
Officials stated in another major step, interactive flat panels (IFPs) are being installed in 30,213 classrooms while 10,038 classrooms will have smart
TVs as part of the digitalisation under Nadu-Nedu. These IFPs would be installed by July end. In the rest of the schools, IFPs and smart TVs would be installed by December.
Steps are also being taken to conduct Toefl examinations to school students in partnership with ETS (Educational Testing Service) to make them globally
competitive.
