Improve Literacy – Open Source Software with Lowest Cost Tablet, Aakash

HOUSTON: Indian institute of Technology Madras Alumni Association and Indian Institutes of Technology Alumni of Greater Houston are hosting a Mentoring event on July 6, at Rice University, Duncan Hall from 4 – 6 p.m.  The Speaker is Dr. Kannan Moudgalya, an IITM and Rice alumni, and IITB Prof. of Chemical Engineering. His Team has created the “Spoken Tutorials” as an innovative approach for self-learning and teaching methods to the children.

Dr. Sidney Burrus, Prof. and Dean Emeritus, Rice will moderate with following Panelists:

Dr. Charles McKay, Professor Emeritus, UHCL

Naren Chavda, President Ekal Vidyalay, Houston

Carmen Johnson, Math Coach, Crockett Elementary and Marshall Middle School, HISD

Haley Rosowsky, Liaison Officer, iEducate USA.

The objectives are to illustrate the benefits of using low cost Tablet hardware with Open Source Software as a means to child’s learning and to use for self-learning.

A “Spoken Tutorial” is a ten minute audio-video tutorial for K – 12 lessons and modules on “Aakash” (meaning Sky in Sanskrit), the world’s lowest cost device at $50. The spoken part of Tutorials is dubbed in all Indian languages, to help kids weak in English.

The main objective of the Project is to improve the employment for students with basic skills. Currently, there are 500 tutorials in English and 2,000 dubbed tutorials in Indian languages. Aakash has also been successfully pilot tested in a North Carolina school system (http://spoken-tutorial.org).