It is a matter of pride and honor that 2 school teachers from Rajasthan are nominated for the President’s Award for excellence in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), from all over the country. In total, there are around 11 nominees for this award. Both the teachers naming, Keshav Das Gupta and Manoj Arya will be awarded on Teachers’ Day (September 5) in New Delhi. They have been very resourceful for their respective schools and students as they introduced e-resource network (web portal, blogs, and videos) so as to improve the learning outcomes of the students.
Mathematics is one of the toughest subjects for the students and thus, Keshav Das Gupta, a senior teacher at government senior secondary school, has made an attempt for simplifying it for class IX and X students by creating a web portal vigyankaksha.blogspot.in . He has not learned Web development from any institution but online and through it made the portal without any sort of help in 2013. Since then, he has come a long way from simplifying complex mathematical concepts via diagrams and videos.
Gupta said, “The absence of academic books in the Hindi medium was the main reason behind poor learning outcomes in maths. I realized that even if books are made available most of the students in the government setup will not be able to afford them so I decided to make a website.”
This effort came out with results soon within a year as the students started scoring 90s and above in the subject in his school. It is very rare in Government schools. Sources also revealed that two of his students scored 96 out of 100 in maths this year. This is because Gupta has not restricted his talent to himself and helped students in the best possible way that he could. Later, he made a group of teachers called Creative Teachers of Rajasthan (CTOR) and also developed a portal, ctor.in , for promoting e-content in the teaching-learning process.
The other teacher Manoj Arya has created a website ramgarhgsss.xyz , for his school, while providing learning material and self-tutorials to the students. He is a teacher at Government Adarsh Senior Secondary School in Ramgarh (Hanumangarh). His school is one of the very few government schools of Rajasthan which have their own website.
“This initiative has created an ecosystem wherein students and teachers could come forward with ideas to use ICT tools for teaching-learning process,” said Arya. He also learns web development online. He also created osict.16mb.com , which is an open-source network where anyone can learn information and basics of communication technology.
