News

From March 21-23, 2016, System Admin training was conducted for the lab staff of all engineering departments of Idukki Engineering College, which was inaugurated by the Principal. Though initially there were about 30 staff participating, this strength dwindled to 5 or 6 attendees in the subsequent days. The training covered installation, command line, customization, package installation and server management. An important part of the training was guiding them on how to migrate from Windows network to Linux.

Women traditionally face disadvantages in accessing and benefitting from technology, and this is doubly true for women living in rural areas. In March 2016, four women hackathons were conducted at four engineering colleges in various parts of the state, with a focus on rural, far-flung areas. These hackathons included OS installation, PHP Programming, and Database management. More than 50 women students participated, and some of them went on to become trainers for Women Hackathons.

 From February 25th to March 3rd 2016, an e-content development program was conducted at Teachers Training College, in which 30 participants were trained in the development and editing of multimedia content. They were taught to use image, audio and video editing tools (Gimp, Audacity and Kdenlive respectively), after which participants created their own video.

A one-day training program was conducted at TTC on ORCA, software that converts text to speech for the visually impaired. However the program could not reach the intended beneficiaries as only one visually challenged person attended.

On 28th January 2016, the Department of Education and SPACE inaugurated an IT workshop for 30 research scholars, who were provided training in using free software, the Internet and ICT. On 30th January, free software tools for teachers were covered. A session on Liberating Knowledge for Liberating Learning was conducted on 3rd February, which included tools for researchers.