Integrated Intelligence
When the CEO of an IT-related company comes calling on India, there's usually a lot of hype and excitement. It was no different with Dr Craig R Barrett, president and CEO of Intel Corp. As is the norm, he attended umpteen meetings and seminars with business leaders, government officials and the who's who of the nation. But one deviation from the norm was when Dr Barrett went calling on a school in Delhi on Thursday evening.
Not really surprising when you consider that the chipmaker has become synonymous with computer related educational initiatives in the country. At Ramjas school, Dr Barrett was promoting the Intel Teach to the Future programme. It's an ambitious programme launched across 20 countries with the idea of training 400,000 teachers in three years. Sounds a tall order? Well, 100,000 of these will be Indian teachers, who will be taught how to use the computer to teach the three Rs. India, in fact, was one of the first countries where the programme was launched and the microprocessor company has in the last three months, already trained over 1,800 teachers.
Crowded around the Intel master's advanced training centre at Ramjas school are teachers who have already become part of the programme. Intel's aim is to captivate students, motivate them and ultimately move them towards greater learning. What better way than to train teachers, who once they are adept, train more teachers who will guide the students of the future. Many of the teachers present here had never handled a computer before, but within 10 to 15 days, or more accurately after 30 hours of training with Intel, had managed to produce elaborate projects. "Remember computers aren't magic, teachers are," twinkled Dr Barrett after his interaction with the best gurus of the lot from all over India.
The session at the school was an eye-opener of sorts. Anjana Khare, a class two Hindi teacher from Shishu Graha School, Bangalore, showed that the computer is not just a tool for teaching maths or science. She had come prepared with a project in which she plans to record the voices of her students to get their pronunciation right. Along with her colleague Mallika Parekh, Khare has already worked on a PowerPoint presentation.
Mithilesh Chaudhary, an advanced level English teacher from Gopi Birla Memorial School, Mumbai has prepared a website, newsletters and animation for her project on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This should be soon available for reference on the net. Chaudhary explains, "After the advanced level, one can graduate to the master's level and train around 15 teachers. The whole project is a hands on experience with hardly any spoon feeding."
So far Intel has adopted and sponsored those schools which have the required infrastructure. As Dr Barrett pointed out: "They have to show interest and approach us. Usually a computer lab is sufficient for us to take over and sponsor the school's activities. In fact, we donate computers and provide funds to them to aid this process."
Intel's programme has started simultaneously in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore and will shortly expand to Hyderabad, Chennai and Pune. "The goal is to cover 20 Indian cities by the year 2002," says Barrett. So will the blackboard give way to the computer screen and chalk to the mouse? In cyber age anything can happen.