Jammu and Kashmir is setting benchmarks in education for the rest of the country with a senior officer in Union Ministry of Communication and IT advocating setting up of the model of Smart Classrooms, adopted by the J&K's Education Department, in schools across the country.Dr Ashwini Kumar Sharma, Managing Director of NIELIT, the knowledge partner of J&K government, Friday said the model of Smart Classrooms adopted by the Education Department must be emulated by schools across the country."The Smart Classroom that are going to be set up in J&K schools have the potential to become the models that can be emulated in schools across the country. I am going to make this recommendation to the Union HRD Ministry," Dr Sharma said.
Two Smart Classrooms at Basoli Higher Secondary School and SRML Higher Secondary School in Jammu were inaugurated by the Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, Education Minister Naeem Akhtar, Advisor to CM, Prof Amitabh Mattoo, MoS Education along with others on Thursday. A Smart Classroom has its own computer lab with various state-of-art equipment including interactive board, multimedia projector, teacher console, visualiser, customised furniture and round-the-clock internet connectivity. The concept of Smart Classrooms was previously limited to the students of Computer Science and Information Technology.
The Education Minister congratulated the NIELIT officials for working against the deadline to implement the project in the government-run schools of the state, "The State Government has already directed the NIELIT to begin work on building Smart Classrooms with Computer Labs in 220 Schools across Jammu and Kashmir," Mr Akhtar said."The introduction of Smart Classrooms will not only revolutinise our education sector but it will also spread digital literacy within schools which will help the students in coping up with the challenges of the modern world," he added.Ayaz Hassan Moon, Regional Director, NIELIT, J&K, said the institute has been actively working with the state's Education Department to not only lay the set-up but also train teachers for using Smart Classrooms."As part of capacity building, we have so far trained two batches of teachers in Jammu (40) and two in Kashmir (48). The Education Minister Naeem Akhtar and Commissioner Secretary, Shaleen Kabra, have shown the way for the rest of the country to follow. The kind of technology used by the education department doesn;t exist even in some of the best private schools," Mr Hassan said. (GNS)