To mark the one year success of 'Punjab Educare App', which has virtually galvanized the school teachers to transform the unprecedented challenge posed by the COVID-19 by ensuring best efforts in utilization of the latest digital application to reach out to the students, is all set for a new look.
Krishan Kumar, Secretary School Education, while lauding the innovative initiative of teachers, said that the Department had chalked out a comprehensive project to update the "Punjab Educare App" with more user-friendly innovations.
"A team of dedicated computer teachers having exclusive expertise in such distinctive areas, has been striving hard to add new features to make the App more student oriented as well as focused on interactive learning", he added.
He said that the Education Department has adopted digital routes like TV/ Radio Channels, What's App, Google Classrooms, YouTube etc to reach out to the students during lockdown period but it involved some teething troubles and both the teachers and students have been facing problems in locating relevant uploads.
Therefore, with a view to give fillip to "Online Education", the Education Department launched an innovative initiative in the form of “Punjab Educare App" on July 11, 2020, he said, adding that now, the study material for the students from Pre primary to 12th is just a click away for the teachers and students.
“Punjab Educare App, during its first year has taken great strides to cater to the need, hope and aspiration of the students to have an easy and hassle free access to the study material. Though in its infancy, it has achieved a distinctive 4.4 out of 5 rating. There are 40,90,021 users, 3,47,23,772 sessions, 34,75,95,133 page views and 24,00,329 downloads of the App so far. The students belonging to other states and UTs, including New Delhi, Chandigarh, Haryana, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttrakhand are also using this user-friendly, easily accessible and easily navigated App”, said DEO Jalandhar.
He said it seems incredible that a team of school teachers from Jalandhar, having no IT background as well as expertise support have initially developed "Punjab Educare App" with their sheer dedication coupled with indigenous innovations. The school teachers are Deepak Kumar, Jaswinder Singh, Harjit Kumar, Haridarshan Singh, Chander Shekhar, Omeshwar Narayan.
Teachers further said that the "Punjab Educare App” is a one stop solution to the problems of accessibility of the study material. “It provides systematically arranged study material including text books, audio / video lessons, and daily assignments in all the subjects. It is a user-friendly app and puts an end to the worry of losing useful study material that is being provided by the education department on a daily basis. It is an additional tool for the teachers and students. The teachers and students can have hassle free access to the syllabus, text books in PDF form, audio / video lectures, worksheets, assignments, word wall activities, quizzes, S.St. Lab, features of smart schools, study material for competitive examinations including NTSE, NMMS, PSTSE”.
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Besides, it helps both teachers and students to recapitulate any topic whenever they want. Besides, new features are being added as per the requirement emerging from time to time.
Moreover, with a view to making its officials and teachers well versed in the use of the advanced IT applications, the Punjab Education Department has launched a “Capacity Building" programme for accelerating the pace of qualitative improvement in education. Under it, a series of webinars for imparting on line training to the officials and teachers were organised.