Christened with the indigenous name Lekha (meaning “writing”), and developed with funding from ICFOSS, Lekha OCR is a Malayalam Optical Character Recognizer (OCR) developed by SPACE. This software converts scanned images of Malayalam text into editable format.
As part of the Adivasi Youth Skill Development Program, ICT training was given to about 40 Adivasi youth in the age group of 15-25 years, from June 2015 onwards. The more backward Paniya community among the Adivasis were mostly included in the program.
With the support of Centre for Disability Studies (CeDS), SPACE is involved in the localisation of educational tools for differently abled children for the Insight project. As part of this, GCompris, a set of educational tools has been translated from English to Malayalam and its content localised and made more relevant – for example, by changing the names of some animals, food items, currency (dollars to rupees) etc.
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.
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.
