Computers in the classroom

As government school classrooms go, this room in the Rajkiya Pratibha Vikas Vidyalaya near Delhi’s Thyagaraj Stadium is strikingly different. Instead of a blackboard, it has a projector and a screen. The teacher wields a mouse instead of chalk. The students have no notebooks — instead their digitised Class VI English textbook is on the screen. However, what makes this classroom unusual is the enthusiastic class participation. All 35 hands go up whenever the teacher asks a question, and when it is their turn to read from the text, all 35 voices rise in high-pitched unison. “To think that when these students joined this school last year, some couldn’t even write their names in Hindi,” says Sunita Sharma, the principal. “But ever since they began learning English using the computer under the Right to Read (RTR) initiative, their reading and comprehension levels have improved substantially.”

A February 2016 assessment of the impact of the RTR initiative, conducted across 12 sample schools in Aurangabad district by independent agency Grey Matters, shows that reading comprehension among students almost doubled after a year of implementation. “This is the impact that technology integrated with curriculum can have on learning outcomes,” says Sanjay Gupta, CEO of EnglishHelper, the company that spearheads RTR and has developed the necessary software for it. “By providing learning and teaching aids to schools with scant resources, educational software can dramatically improve how English, and indeed all other subjects, are taught in India’s 1.3 million government schools.”

Photo:ENGLISHHELPER

I stand behind a class full of students, mostly first-generation learners, as Gupta’s Read To Me software reads out a story from their curriculum. After each paragraph, the software pauses for students to read the lines aloud themselves. “Repetition helps them to develop confidence while speaking in English, essentially a foreign language to them,” says Yadavendra Shukla, their English teacher. “This way children also learn how to pronounce words correctly.” He drags the cursor to the word “companion” and asks different students to spell it. “Can anyone tell me its meaning?” he asks. Some children answer in Hindi, others in English. But all know what it means. “It has really made the teacher’s job simpler,” says he, “and the student’s learning more efficient.” Earlier, Shukla says he had to virtually translate every word for students in Hindi, and even then, most looked like they didn’t understand a word. “Teaching was a different ball game then,” he says. As I watch Shukla navigate the software with ease, he says that the students’ obvious enjoyment of the class gives him added motivation. 

Gupta and his cohorts would like to see RTR enable all the students in India’s government schools to speak and understand English. But is the initiative that scalable? “With the help of our resource partners, we were able to scale from 300 to 5,000 schools in a matter of months,” says Gupta. “I’m confident we can expand way faster than any human resource-based intervention can.” 

The RTR programme needs only a laptop, projector, speakers and screen to set up. Since 2013, when the initiative was launched, they’ve partnered with American India Foundation and IL&FS Education, who provide infrastructural support for the programme in the schools where they already provide computer education. The training of existing teachers can be done either face-to-face or on Skype. 

Schools without internet access are given DVDs of the software. The partner agencies monitor the classes and also conduct regular assessments of the programme’s efficacy.  

As of now, USAID is sponsoring much of the Right to Read initiative. It is currently operational in over 5,000 schools spread across nine states and impacts about one million children. Excluding expenditure on infrastructure and manpower, the programme costs about Re1 per child per day to implement. “In the years ahead, we plan to impact schools in most states in India,” says Gupta. 

“Perhaps we could use this platform to teach not only English, but other subjects as well.” 

The classroom bursts into applause as a student gets the spelling of “crocodile” right after several tries. I muse that the Right To Read technology hasn’t just brought English language to life in these hitherto unproductive classrooms,  it has also brought back the sheer joy of learning.  

Learn more at www.englishhelper.com or follow them on Facebook and Twitter 

Next fortnight, an initiative that brings music into the lives of the underprivileged