Bangalore, December 21, 2020 – Lenovo, the global technology leader has collaborated with Meghshala Trust, a not-for-profit, to promote education technology and to support teacher training and value education systems across India. Just prior to COVID-19, Meghshala signed an MoU with the Department of Education, Meghalaya, to train 600 teachers from East Garo Hills and West Khasi Hills.
Through the COVID-19 lockdown measures, Meghshala conducted orientations for District functionaries to provide an overview of the app and the training. Since social distancing and lockdown measures began, in response to COVID-19, Meghshala has seen greater than 18,000 app downloads. The app has concept-based student models and curriculum-aligned, self-guided lessons. Apart from that, there are short professional development modules for teachers, e-lessons by teachers for students’ use, and science experiments and math learning content available on the Meghshala YouTube channel. As per the statistics, Meghshala App usage has been recorded as 13,600 hours in total and 1,795,703 slides were browsed this year.
With Lenovo’s investment of US$ 80,000, Meghshala implemented e-learning classrooms in Karnataka, Manipur, Sikkim, and Meghalaya. Today, Meghshala has reached 3,333 schools in Manipur and Karnataka and boasts of 10,175 users 18,000 downloads on their free Meghshala app. Meghshala’s digitised content with e-lessons empowers teachers to be instructional leaders in the classroom reaching out to the farthest communities in the Indian landscape. This partnership alone has impacted over 210,000 students and 7000 plus teachers across India.
Meghshala believes that teachers shape the future of their students every day. Their journey began with a team of educators and technology experts working to create impact at scale. In 2015-16, they started with 45 schools targeting about 100 teachers in Karnataka. Now in the year 2019-20, Meghshala has reached over 2500 schools and if each teacher teaches 30 students at least, the number of students it has impacted in Karnataka alone is around 1,34,000. Over the last two years, Lenovo supported Meghshala by providing tablets and smartphones for both teacher training and student use, helping reach more than 1,800 schools and 4,900 teachers in Karnataka and Manipur.
To enhance and empower teachers, Lenovo supports Meghshala Trust in its vision of education for a better world. Together they focus on Teacher training and STEM-based education for children in classroom environments. To date, they have delivered NCERT aligned quality lessons to students in Science, Mathematics, English, EVS, and Social Studies across grades 1-8 with Hindi and English as the medium of instruction.
“Lenovo has been our perfect partner. Whether it was in a rain-ravaged Coorg from last year or in the pristine, crystal-clear air of the state of Meghalaya, Lenovo has been on our side to help teachers with hardware or help our implementation associates get to the far corners of the states. They have been our ideating partners, our go-to friends, and our hardware expert advisors. We could not have done what we did without them”- Jyoti Thyagarajan, Founder & Executive Trustee, Meghshala Trust.
“Smarter Technology for All forms the fabric of the Lenovo and Motorola business as well as our social outlook. This philosophy underpins our mission to empower diverse, underserved, and underprivileged populations by increasing access to STEM education to empower communities with technology and opportunity in which we operate to improve their way of living. We believe that one of the most efficient ways to transform the educational system is empowering teachers with the right skills and techniques. Hence, Lenovo has been working with a like-minded organisation – Meghshala to empower teachers with training in right skills and techniques.” – Rahul Agarwal, CEO and Managing Director, Lenovo India.