Shillong, Dec 30: With the technological aid from Lenovo, Meghshala is tapping into the remotest region of North East India where there is limited access to technology, inadequate funds, and infrastructure. In this regard, the Meghalaya Education Department (MED) has signed an MOU with Meghshala to train 600 teachers from East Garo Hills and West Khasi Hills.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, Lenovo said, “Just prior to the recent pandemic, Megshshala signed an MoU with the Department of Education Meghalaya to train 600 teachers from East Garo Hills and West Khasi Hills.”

Lenovo collaborated with Meghshala Trust, a not-for-profit, to promote online education and support teacher training and value education systems across India.

The statement said, “This partnership will aid in training 600 teachers from East Garo Hills and West Khasi Hills.”

Meghshala is looking to help in the implementation and organization of training sessions for the teachers in such regions.

Meghshala recently received permission from the Education Department of Sikkim to train more teachers. In addition, a private school in East Gangtok has requested Meghshala to conduct a training session for their staff during the pandemic. Lenovo, with its timely donations of tablets and smartphones, is aiding schools in rural areas to become conversant with technology.

Meghshala was the first to collaborate with Lenovo to try out a new model called the- Tablets for Education, where Lenovo sponsored 50 tablets to be deployed by Meghshala to 10 schools in Belagavi, Karnataka in 2018. Today, it 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.

Jyoti Thyagarajan Founder & Executive Trustee, Meghshala Trust said, “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,” she added.

Rahul Agarwal – CEO and Managing Director, Lenovo India said, “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 & opportunity in which we operate to improve their way of living,” Agarwal added.

He further said, “ 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 organization – Meghshala to empower teachers with training in the right skills and techniques.”

Through the lockdown measures, Megshala 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 the pandemic, 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 80k US Dollars, Meghshala implemented e-learning classrooms in Karnataka, Manipur, Sikkim, and Meghalaya. Today, Meghshala has reached 3333 schools in Manipur and Karnataka and boasts of 10,175 users 18,000 downloads on their free Meghshala app. Meghshala’s digitized 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 the year 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.