New education channel planned in South

The Tamil Nadu government is planning to launch an education channel on its Arasu Cable Television Network.

School education minister N R Sivapathy said that an experts’ committee will be constituted to look at the overall quality of school education, and another team of experts will look at the present higher-secondary syllabus and suggest necessary changes to upgrade it and equip the students to cope with challenges of higher education.

“This (new education channel) would bring in quality education to the students at their homes after school hours. It would help all the students get the best tutorials, seminars, lectures and other related programmes, which otherwise would not have been accessible to them,” the minister said. The channel was part of the information and communication technology initiatives of his department for 2012-13, he told the Assembly.

Besides, the department is planning to launch an SMS-based application to monitor teacher attendance. The application will be integrated with the Education Management Information System (EMIS) which will have the entire database of schools, teachers, students and officials by the end of 2012-13, he said.

“This will be activated across schools from June 1, 2012. The attendance of teaching and non-teaching staff will be communicated by the headmasters to the central server which in turn will transmit the information to all higher officials of the department,” he added.

The government has also proposed a smart card system for school students. From June 1, 2012, all children in government and aided schools will be provided with a smart card, which will consist of details pertaining to the child that will be stored in a central server.

“This complete data of children will be very useful for providing all the facilities to them. This card is also integrated with EMIS,” Sivapathi said.