IT@School Project (Kerala, India): Worlds largest simultaneous FOSS deployment

IT@School:At a Glance


* World’s largest simultaneous deployment of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) based ICT education
* Capacity building of the teaching and the learning community
* Infrastructure Upgradation of schools under ICT scheme
* Broadband internet connectivity to all schools in the state
* Hardware Clinics- first of its kind to repair damaged computers at schools
* Unique scheme for electrification of classrooms to fuel ICT enabled education.
* ICT based Content Development for teachers and students
* E-Governance Initiatives in General Education department
* School Wiki – to promote collaborative content development

* EDUSAT initiatives in the state including ViCTERS educational channel

* The target group of IT@School Project is the dynamic group of students, teacher and parents, but primarily the Students. Today after 10 years of operations in the state, IT@School has proven that ICT enabled education could be implemented in the state in a phased manner which would benefits millions of student populace. A breakup of the target population is as below;

o Over 12,000 schools
o About 60 lakh students
o About 2 lakh teachers

IT@School Project has successfully rolled out several programmes which included the development of its own Operating System - IT@School GNU/Linux- which is now being used in all the schools in the state. Apart from this, several educational softwares like Dr. Geo, Rasmol, K-Tech lab, Geogebra, Chemtool, Kalcium etc are being extensively customised by the Project in developing teacher friendly applications for facilitating complete ICT enabled education in the state. The Project has also prepared interactive multimedia CDs, Handbooks & Training modules for ICT, as well as Text books for IT in standard 8, 9 and 10. Every content developed by the Project is strictly as per the new curriculum approach based on the National Curriculum Framework 2005. The Project has also associated with Intel Skool for collaborative content development programmes http://kerala.skoool.in .

The Project has also developed contents for Upper Primary classes – for 5-7 classes and the same has been given to all schools. To add with this, the Project had developed E-Text books for Std 8 to 10.
The ICT enabling process which was piloted in the state two years back has become a success; with this year’s 8th Standard IT text book being entirely based on ICT enabled education, with inputs from all subjects. An unique 8GB Resource DVD for teachers was also developed by IT@School Project, which included the latest edition of Edusoft, 50 selected articles from Malayalam Wiki, Malayalam Computing tools, IT@School Linux 3.2 Operating system, New Edition of Ubuntu OS, ICT Training module, Educational contents on Biology & Maths and PDF versions of Textbooks and Handbooks. The ICT training by making use of the Resource DVD is been imparted to over 60,000 teachers in the state.

The Project also introduced a customized version of WIKI, namely www.schoolwiki.in which provides a comprehensive knowledge database of all schools in the state. The aim of SchoolWiki is to bring out collaborative data building and to generate more interest among students to learn Malayalam and to generate more contents in various subjects. Schoolwiki also features an ICT Learning Corner, which would include the various contents prepared by schools for all subjects in ICT enabled education. The various contents are packed in DVD and CD ROMs which are supplied free of cost to the schools with the idea of free distribution among the learning and teaching community. This process eventually resulted in the Free Digital Library at Schools wherein the contents included the subjectwise contents, contents which are telecasted through ViCTERS channel, exam oriented programmes etc. With all schools provided with Broadband connectivity, most of these contents were also made available online.

An important fact to be noted here is that all these contents and applications which are developed by the Project are completely developed or customized using Free Software only. The main reason for adopting free software platform is that it gives freedom to an individual to study, copy, modify and re-distribute any content and this process would be beneficial to the whole society, besides considering the cost factor.

Download: it@school-gnu-linux-3.8


Awards

Stockholm Challenge 2010- Honorable Mention

IT@School Project has received glorious recognition at the Stockholm Challenge Awards -2010, an international award for innovative information technology projects, invariably termed as the biggest recognition for ICT interventions in development sector on a global platform. In the Stockholm Challenge Awards -2010, IT@School has received Honorable Mention in Education category, which is awarded to the top projects. A total of 290 projects from 90 different nations competed for the prestigious award under six categories. The Stockholm Challenge Award which was started in 1994 at Stockholm, Sweden, is considered to be the greatest recognition in ICT initiatives all around the world. Dr. Bebo White, Former Department Associate of Stanford University of USA heads the 10-member Jury as its Chairman.

Open Document Format (ODF) Alliance Award 2009

IT@School Project received the ODF Alliance Award 2009 for exemplary contributions to ODF community development and education. ODF Alliance awards recognize the contribution of individuals or entities who have significantly advanced document freedom. The Open Document Format Alliance is an organization of governments, academic institutions, non-government organizations and industry dedicated to educating policy makers, IT administrators and the public on the benefits and opportunities of ODF.

The World is Open Award 2008

The IT@School Project, under Department of General Education, Government of Kerala bagged ‘The World is Open Award 2008’ for promoting the use of Open source technology.The award was given for the first time as a joint venture of Skotch Consultancy Services and Redhat. The Award was Given away by Punjab National Bank CMD Chakraborthy to Sri. K. Anvar Sadath, Executive Director, IT@School Project at an award ceremony held at Indian Habitat Center, New Delhi, on 19th March 2008. The Jury consisting of Dr. Vijayaditya, Controller of Certifying Authourity, Dr. Phatak, IIT-Mumbai, selected IT@School Project for the award in educational sector through out the Nation after evaluating 163 Projects.

E-India award - 2008 National
E-Governance award 2005
Kerala State E-Governance Award 2010



A brief outlay of the Project

Name of the Project: IT@School Project
Proponent Organization: Department of General Education, Government of Kerala
Implementation State: Kerala, India
Target Population: About 2 lakh teachers and more than 60 lakh students in Kerala
Organization & Address: IT@School project, Poojappura, Thiruvananthapuram,
Kerala, INDIA. Pin code: - 695012
Email: director@itschool.gov.in

Top 5 Linux Audio,Video and Photo Editing Software's

Audio Editing Software's

1.Linux Multimedia Studio

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to Record live audio, Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files, Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together, Change the speed or pitch of a recording and do a lot more.

2.RoseGarden

Rosegarden is a professional audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment. It is an easy-to-learn, attractive application that runs on Linux, ideal for composers, musicians, music students, and small studio or home recording environments.

3.JokoSher

A simple and powerful multi-track studio, Jokosher provides a complete application for recording, editing, mixing and exporting audio, and has been specifically designed with usability in mind.

4.Grip

Grip is a cd-player and cd-ripper for the Gnome desktop. It has the ripping capabilities of cdparanoia builtin, but can also use external rippers such as cdda2wav. It also provides an automated frontend for MP3 and other audio format encoders, letting you take a disc and transform it easily straight into MP3s. Internet disc lookups are supported for retrieving track information from disc database servers.Grip works with DigitalDJ to provide a unified “computerized” version of your music collection.

5.Hydrogen

Hydrogen is an advanced drum machine for GNU/Linux. It’s main goal is to bring professional yet simple and intuitive pattern-based drum programming. It is cery user-friendly, modular, fast and intuitive graphical interface based on QT 3.

Video Editing Software's

1.Avidemux

Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities. Avidemux is available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows under the GNU GPL license.

2.Cinelerra

Cinelerra is the most advanced non-linear video editor and compositor for Linux. Cinelerra also includes a video compositing engine, allowing the user to perform common compositing operations such as keying and mattes. Cinelerra includes support for very high-fidelity audio and video: it processes audio using 64 bits of precision, and can work in both RGBA and YUVA color spaces, using floating-point and 16-bit integer representations, respectively. It is resolution and frame rate-independent, meaning that it can support video of any speed and size.

3.Kdenlive

Kdenlive is an intuitive and powerful multi-track video editor, including most recent video technologies. Kdenlive supports all of the formats supported by FFmpeg (such as QuickTime, AVI, WMV, MPEG, and Flash Video), and also supports 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios for both PAL, NTSC and various HD standards, including HDV. Video can also be exported to DV devices, or written to a DVD with chapters and a simple menu. Kdenlive packages are freely available for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X under the terms of GNU General Public License version 2 or any version later.

4.Kino

Kino is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera. It captures video to disk in Raw DV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings.

5.LiVES

LiVES (LiVES is a Video Editing System) is a free software video editing program and VJ tool. LiVES mixes realtime video performance and non-linear editing in one professional quality application. It will let you start editing and making video right away, without having to worry about formats, frame sizes, or framerates. It is a very flexible tool which is used by both professional VJ's and video editors - mix and switch clips from the keyboard, use dozens of realtime effects, trim and edit your clips in the clip editor, and bring them together using the multitrack timeline. You can even record your performance in real time, and then edit it further or render it straight away.


Photo Editing Software's

1.GIMP

There is no doubt that GIMP is the closest alternative to Photoshop. GIMP is used by many professionals and contains most of the functions in Photoshop. While some people dislike the interface and find it hard to use, there are still many others who love this open source software. You can find a huge user community supporting this product. Many Linux distributions have also used GIMP as the default image editing program. GIMP is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OSX.

2.GimpShop


Using GIMP as the backend, GIMPshop added an extra interface to make it looks and functions more like Photoshop. If you are looking for Photoshop alternative, but hate the interface of GIMP, you might want to try out GIMPshop

3.Krita

Krita is a painting and image editing application for Koffice and is part of the KDE package. It has become very popular recently due to its ease of use. While it is not as feature-rich as the Photoshop, or even GIMP, it does contains the necessary tools to create/edit a professional image from scratch. In fact, the latest version contains some features that are not found in both GIMP and Photoshop.

4.Paint.net

Paint.NET is more than the default Paint application in Windows. Originally designed as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint, it has grown substantially to become a simple, yet powerful image editor. While still not on par with Photoshop, it does have plenty of useful features such as layers and filters. Currently, Paint.net can only be used on computers that run Windows, however a project that ports Paint.net to Linux, via mono is available for Hardy Heron. It is still not stable, but if you are adventurous enough, you might want to try it in your Hardy. To install Paint.net, add the following repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list

5.CinePiant

CinePaint is a deep paint image retouching tool that supports higher color fidelity than ordinary painting tools. One of the advantage that it has over GIMP is that it is able to support 32-bits image (GIMP only supports 8-bits image). Cinepaint is mainly used by developers in the flim industry for motion picture frame-by-frame retouching. The current version runs on Linux, BSD, Mac OSX. Stable version for Windows is not available at the moment.

These are Just a few Well known applications and Lot's more still waiting for surprise You...