DIET Uttara Kannada - Workshop on Academic linkages / networking

Workshop Report – Samartha Project – Uttara Kannada on 'Digital methods for strengthening DIET-BRC Linkages' between August 16-18 2011

Participants – DIET faculty and BRC faculty from four BRCs part of the Samartha program (Ankola, Kumta, Honnavar and Sirsi)

Faculty – Gurumurthy and Ramkumar (C-LAMPS), Shariff Mulla (IT for Change)

The workshop aimed to help participants in:

Learning Audio/video conference between DIETs and BRCs for academic monitoring and collaborative working

1. Reviewing the Maths and Science Position papers Kannada commentaries

2. Learning basic utilities like tux typing

3. Learning basics of video editing

4. Collating a baseline of information and communication processes at Kumta

   1. information creation processes

   2. sharing processes

   3. storing processes

5. Software applications – advanced use

   1. Writer, Calc and Impress (OpenOffice)

6. Learning basics of public educational software tools - geogebra, marble, k stars

7. Digital tools for mass communication to enable faculty communicate with others

The workshop covered all of these objectives, except basics of video editing for want of time.

The workshop agenda is given below (Click here to download the agenda)

Proceeding Highlights

Day 1 – August 16. Advanced use of software applications and educational tools

Introduction to workshop, methodology

Workshop aimed at helping participants to learn to use different digital tools for creating, accessing, storing and sharing knowledge. Methodology was a combination of explanation/demonstration and hands-on. It was participatory with comments, questions and suggestions from all participants

Open Office/LibreOffice

Basic use of Office Writer, covering Kannada Typing configuring, UNICODE fonts , Track changes, table of contents and page formatting was covered. Participants were explained why UNICODE font should be used, irrespective of office suite or operating system being used. Table below gives the details

Participants also saw the video (spoken tutorial) on Kannada typing using OpenOffice.

Skype ids for audio and video conferencing were setup – DIETKUMTA1 and id for each of the core team members have been setup

Day 2 – August 17 – Video conferencing, audio conferencing, messaging

Session on 'why digital methods are important for accessing, storing, sharing and creating (the four actions connected to knowledge) information was explained

Presentation software – Impress was shown and features like custom animation was explained and practised

Audio and video conference was done using Skype on Ubuntu. Video conference on 1-1 and multi-person audio conference was successfully done.

Mass communication with digital tools - participants learn to use Way2sms for sending sms through Internet to many people

The DIET File server was set up

Spreadsheet - advanced feature of DATA PILOT was taught to core team members to analyse the DISE data. See Uttara Kannada Primary School DISE 2010 Information for Decision Support.ods for this)

Day 3 – August 18. Position papers review. Information and Communication processes using digital methods

A session on NCF 2005 explained the vision, principles of this document.

Maths and Science Kannada commentaries on Position papers was reviewed and feedback given for improving and finalising. Follow the links to read the Kannda commentary on position papers on Mathematics and Science, NCF - 2005 by the participants of the workshops

1. Kannada Commentary on Position Paper on Mathematics, NCF - 2005
2. Kannada Commentary on Position Paper on Science, NCF - 2005

Participants were taught how to use Data Pilot feature and other features in OpenOffice CALC for data analyses.

The core team practised video and audio conference using SKYPE a second time.

Way forward on project was discussed with core team and Principal and following actions were immediately actioned

Email features - core team members were taught to set-up Thunderbird as mail client for GMAIL. Core team to create DIETKUMTA@GOOGLEGROUPS.COM for internal DIET communications. This is in addition to the KBUTTARAKANNADA@GOOGLEGROUPS.COM that is being used already by project members.

Each diet faculty has been assigned a computer in lab. Each faculty Id has also been created so that they can securely log into their computer and store their own data on the computer. Ubuntu allows multiple user ids on one computer and gives each user a unique space for their work

Session on information and communication processes at Kumta

• Create – make, upload

• Access / search, get

• Store, keep

• Share, give to others

Today how are you storing information/ TOMORROW HOW WILL YOU STORE INFORMATION

What information

1. Email ids of colleagues

2. School information / dise information,

3. Teacher information, training information, teacher competencies, subject teacher forum, resource groups

4. Child information -oos, census, progress

5. Parent, community information

6. Government schemes, incentive, mms,

7. Reports - visit reports/ evaluation reports

8. Academic plans, schools plans, diet plan

9. Administration records – service, attendance etc

10. Financial records

11. Resource persons list information

12. Resource materials – by subject, by training module

Core team created relevant folders on the File Server and many have been populated with resources from the project. The file server will be the repository of all information in Kumta DIET which all faculty members can access from any computer in the lab through the network.

You can download the workshop report here and the report on video conferencing here.