The State-Led Model of the IBM STEM for Girls Program to 258 Schools across 30 districts of Odisha was launched today by School & Mass Education Minister Samir Ranjan Dash, in presence of Satyabrata Sahu, Principal Secretary (S & ME), Bhupendra Singh Poonia, State Project Director (OSEPA), Manoj Balchandran, Head-CSR, IBM India and South Asia and other dignitaries to help in building capacity of girls in digital fluency, career choice, STEM mindset, life skills, etc.
These schools shall emerge as 21st-century skills learning spaces and shall be role models for the rest of the schools in the state. Further, IBM and its partners QUEST Alliance and others will be working closely to build educational leadership at the school, district and state level; develop a pool of master trainers for leading the teacher capacity-building efforts, and aligning the state curriculum with National Education Policies with particular emphasis on building 21st-century skills among learners.
The Inauguration ceremony followed by four days of training on virtual facilitation and 21st-century skills will be attended by 516 teachers, 258 Head Teachers and DEOs from 30 districts. The training will help teachers gain skills for virtual facilitation and understanding 21st-century teaching skills. As the schools continue to remain closed due to the COVID 19 lockdown, the teachers will also be developing plans for engaging students through virtual modes on the curriculum of self, gender, career and computational thinking. These will help learners build skills of critical thinking, problem-solving, decision making, creativity, innovativeness to name a few. It will also encourage more girls to opt for STEM Pathways as they move towards continuing their education and taking up a career. It will give them the digital fluency needed for a clearer career choice in future. As the pandemic has pointed out the need for digital literacy and modern online education, our teachers need to educate themselves on the subject of such pressing importance if they are to hold the torch of education high in the state. By the end of this training, the teachers will be able to understand about online and remote learning platforms/apps and processes, understand basic etiquettes and norms of online teaching, develop knowledge and skills to curate and develop content for facilitating virtual sessions.
The S&ME Minister also has expressed his happiness towards the performance of State on education as the PGI (Performance Grading Index) score of Odisha has increased from 749 in 2018-19 to 838 in 2019-20 raising the status from Yellow to Green. There has been notable improvement in the domain of infrastructure, governance and equity. This could only be possible under the visionary leadership and guidance of Hon’ble Chief Minister, Odisha.
Shri Satyabrata Sahu, Principal Secretary S&ME appreciated the activities taken up under the program and urged to extend it to 1000 High Schools under the process of transformation for quality learning.
