Rajasthan gets its first IT academy

Opened in Jaipur, this academy would be central point for providing IT training to teachers across the state

Education department of government of Rajasthan and Micro­soft Corporation India has announced the formal launch of Microsoft IT academy in the state of Rajasthan. The IT academy situated in Jaipur will serve to be a pivotal point for imparting IT training to teachers across the state.

The IT Academy was inaugurated by State CM Vasundhara Raje. She was accompanied by Ghanshyam Tiwari, Minister of Education; Vasudev Devnani, Minister of State for Education; Peter Moore, MD, Public Sector, Microsoft Asia Pacific and Rohit Kumar, Country Head – Public Sector, Microsoft India Corporation Pvt Ltd.

Under the MoU, signed between these two last year, over the next five years Micro-soft will accelerate IT integrat-ion in education amongst 8000 teachers and over 400,000 students (from Class III to Class XII) across 3,000 state government schools. As per the agree­ment with the govt of Rajasthan, Microsoft is committed to offer a 12 days training program free of cost for participating teachers to equip them to use techno­logy in teaching students in a classroom environment.

Concerned officials infor­med that the Jaipur IT Aca­demy is located at Radhakrish-nan Shiksha Sankul, JLN Marg covering an area of over 3000 sq ft. It is a world-class facility equipped with a state-of-the-art IT lab complete with latest hard­ware, software, curricu-lum and staff for effective delivery of IT training for school­teachers. While 20 PCs will be used for the routine training process, a laptop has been provided to the IT Acad-emy Manager who is required to visit various schools across the state to ensure consis­tency in delivery process.  To ensure wider participation and local relevance, the IT training courseware is trans­lated in Hindi in partnership with the state education department.

Since the MoU signing in August last year, Microsoft has already trained over 400 teachers. In addition to the training at the IT Academy, Microsoft has also started teacher training at five DIET centers in the state at Sikar, Sirhohi, Sri Ganganagar, Bhilwara and Jhlalwar districts.

Commenting on the part­ner­ship, Raje said, “Our partnership with Microsoft compliments our govern­ment's unique focus for leveraging technology to create a skilled resource base in our state comprising of the next generation of IT profess-ionals. Driven by this vision, our Rajasthan educa­tion initi-ative is focused on enabling widespread advan­ce­ments in the education sector. Our partnership with Microsoft is a key deliverable here and we are confident that the IT Academy set up today will encourage early adoption of technologies by both students and teachers across govern-ment schools in the state.”

However Tiwari was happy to announce that in the short period of one year, finalizing the form and content of the REI and launching the imple­mentation strategy has been a great achievement. Itera­ting the Rajasthan Education Initiatives aims, Vasudev Devnani clarified that it is a new venture for engaging global and local partners from the private corporate sector, foundations, NGOs in innovative multi stake holder partnerships to quantitatively support education in the State of Rajasthan.

Elaborating on Microsoft's vision for IT education, Moore said “We firmly believe techno-logy holds tremendous poten-tial for transforming the tradit-ional classroom environment and helping students and teac-hers learn more in a dynamic and interactive manner. Towa-rds meeting this objective, our Partners-in-Learning program is geared to deliver the latest technology solutions in ways that are affordable and acces-sible for the education comm-unity, and ultimately help create an educational exper-ience that connects, removes limitations and creates oppor-tunities today and for the future.” Commenting on the India momentum of Micro-soft's Partners-in-Learning, Rohit Kumar, said “Under our Part­ners-in-Learning pro­gram we seek to work in close part­nership with state govern­ments and education depart­ments for accelerating IT literacy amongst students and teachers across govern­ment schools. Today we are collaborating with nine state governments and have trained over 52,000 plus teachers and reached out to over 2.6 million students.”

DQW News Bureau Jaipur, March 8