English helper course for school teachers
The Hindu
With the objective of improving corporation school students’ fluency in English, the American India Foundation on Friday launched a programme to train teachers in using information technology to teach the language.
Conducted jointly with EnglishHelper Technologies, the programme involves the use of a software — ReadToMe. Initially, corporation school students from Standards VI to VIII would be covered under this initiative.
According to Kalpana Rajgopal from EnglishHelper Technologies, the curriculum would be loaded into this software, which had a speech engine that would verbalise the lessons. This would help students with their pronunciations, spellings and comprehend the subject better. By reading text that is relevant to their context, learners’ comprehension and motivation is increased and the learning, enhanced, she added.
V. Alexander, regional coordinator, (Digital Equalizer Programme), AIF, said that 78 corporation school teachers would be given training to use these IT tools to teach the students under this initiative. Coordinators from AIF and EnglishHelper Technologies would attend the classes at schools.
This software would be installed in one computer each in 13 corporation schools (six high schools and the rest higher secondary schools). In each school, at least four teachers would be trained to use the software.
There will be three sessions a week for each class under this new initiative.
