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— Shashi Ashiwal

DreamSpark: The Microsoft India Managing Director, Mr Rajan Anandan (left), the Maharashtra Chief Minister, Mr Ashok Chavan, the Maharashtra Minister of Education, Mr Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, and the Maharashtra Education Secretary, Mr Sanjay Kumar, at the signing of the MoU in Mumbai on Tuesday.

Our Bureau

Mumbai, Aug 18 The Maharashtra Government has signed a memorandum of understanding with Microsoft India to enhance the adoption of information, communication and technology in schools across the State.

Microsoft will develop a single login through Microsoft’s Live@Edu initiative, which will enable all students and teachers across the approximately 85,000 schools in the state to acquire email with school-specific domains, provide them with applications aimed to enhance collaboration (through Office Live Workspace), and give the school tools for creating an online community.

In addition, Microsoft will deploy its global program ‘DreamSpark’, under which a student can get access to the suite of Microsoft Software Development tools at no cost. According to a company press release, 50,000 technical students would benefit from DreamSpark.

Microsoft will also help build last-mile capacity among educators. One educator from each cluster in the state will be required to undergo a 10-day training module in a classroom set-up. Each of the trained resources can then further build ICT readiness among others educators in the cluster. Microsoft will conduct over 200 sessions at the district level over the next two years to train 6,000 resources in as many clusters.

The state already has a long association with Microsoft as part of which it has set up three IT academies in Pune, Nagpur and Aurangabad, and trained over 92,000 teachers who in turn helped over 46 lakh students.

“I completely favour a complete overhaul in our education system. I agree that some policy changes need to be made for the same,” said Mr Ashok Chavan, Chief Minister of Maharashtra.

More Stories on : IT Training | Education | Software | Maharashtra

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