Three lakh Kerala school children to come under ICT Club

Thiruvananthapuram, Jan 2 (IANS) Three lakh schoolchildren in Kerala will, in two years time, come under the ICT Club, the largest students' IT network in the country managed by the state owned IT@School Project.

The club will focus on areas like animation, multimedia, hardware, electronics, language computing and internet and cyber safety.

Education Minister C. Ravindranath said the programmes aims at facilitating an in-depth ICT learning environment for students to provide them with an experience of group learning as well as collaborative learning, thereby improving the efficiency of ICT enabled education in schools.

"As part of General Education Protection Mission, the Hi-School Student Group programme would be strengthened and the students' participation would be ensured in various activities," Ravindranath said.

The programme would be implemented in state run schools and a committee would be set-up with the headmaster as convener to coordinate the school level activities of the programme.

"As many as one lakh students would be part of this programme in this academic year itself and IT@School project would develop a mechanism for these students to provide the awareness and training for other students and parents. At the next academic year, another two lakh students would be covered," said K. Anvar Sadath, Executive Director of IT@School.

Various organisations such as Google (Internet Safety), Start-up Mission (Electronics) and Swathanthra Malayalam Computing will support this activity.