You can see the list of finalist here : http://www.echoinggreen.org/blog/announcing-2013-echoing-green-fellowships-finalists

Neil D’souza, our founder started Zaya in 2011 by piloting the first learning labs in Indonesia and Mongolia. In the early days the focus of the organization was to bring resources like Khan Academy to unprivileged children and to develop technologies that will make it easy and simple to use. After 2 years, Zaya has come a long way where we are now building an end to end model to tackle the biggest challenges of education head on.

In the information age we have stepped in, the conflict in education is one of the major obstacles that is impeding mankind from progressing together. Our motto is to give access to economically disadvantaged students to world class education that can empower them and consequentially make them world leaders. The aim is at bridging the achievement gap between the developed and 3^rd world societies, so that in the future we have a level playground. 

Our prime focus today is on creating a network of learning labs that is powered by our personalized blended learning approach targeted primarily to the bottom of the social pyramid. We have also developed lab kits that help any individual who shares our dream to set up learning labs at minimal cost with the same quality infrastructure. We wish to provide these kits to women who can run these learning labs as businesses and empower themselves and their communities.

As we prepare to sit face to face with the US headquartered Echoing Green judges and staff for another round of rigorous interviews and compete for the top position for Echoing Green 2013, the only hope that drives us is to make a poignant dent in the education space for the children at the last mile.

Read about Vaishnavi’s experience below…..

Volunteering and internship for TAC in the junior year of my high school was truly an eye-opening experience. Teaching young children at a remote village, Juvvalapalem, and watching these kids eagerly learning the new material and always smiling despite their tough situation forced me to reevaluate all the things I had for granted.

As a TAC volunteer, I communicated with local non-government organizations in India to identify schools and orphanages which could benefit from a TAC educational hotspot.  I eventually collaborated with Parivarthan foundation, a non-profit organization, whose mission is to bring about socio-economic changes among the rural and underprivileged communities. With the help of Parivarthan, I identified a school in a remote, Indian village called Juvvalapalem, and was able to work with its school teachers to structure the educational content to suit their state curriculum.

In the beginning it was very difficult to identify relevant content because not all the topics pertaining to this state curriculum were covered within TAC’s existing material. To fill this gap, I had to find content providers that specialized in the missing content. BodhaGuru was one such content provider and with its help I was able to put together the missing content. Additionally, as the students only spoke Telugu, I translated the slides and quiz sections of each topic from English to Telugu. By doing this, I was able to build content for this village school that provided educational video lessons, questions and answers, and quizzes for each topic of their Science curriculum.

Later, as a summer intern, I traveled to Juvvalapalem to deploy the hotspot and train the teachers and students on how to use this educational system for their classes. The journey to the village was not an easy one; the muddy, uneven and narrow roads made travelling very difficult. Beyond that, I faced several technical problems while setting up the hotspot. Although the school had computers, the network connectivity was broken due to recent flooding that damaged the cables.

I re-networked all the computers, installed the hotspot, and connected the computers to the hotspot. The erratic power outages and low efficiency of the power backup did not make things easier. However, I was able to overcome all these hurdles by working long hours when the power was available and, within a few days, I successfully fixed all the network issues. Then I trained the Parivarthan teachers on how to use the hotspot, which does not require internet access, in their lessons which they eagerly embraced. The children were extremely enthusiastic as well; they were captivated by the video animations that told their lessons in their native language, Telugu. The schools’ staff was also extremely supportive of the whole program and gave us extra time with the kids.

During my time in Juvvalapalem, I also trained the Computer Administrators of Parivarthan to manage the hotspot. But to maximize the effectiveness of the TAC system, I had to find more permanent solutions to the network and power problems the school faced. Therefore, after I came back to US, I discussed this limitation with TAC founder and subsequently, TAC supplied tablets to this school. Now the students can also use tablets instead of computers when there are power outages and the power back up systems are completely drained. Furthermore, tablets cut back on all of the networking and cables involved since the entire system is wireless. After deploying these tablets to Juvvalapalem, I am communicating with Parivarthan administrators on weekly basis to further ensure that the program is running smoothly.

I hope to return as TAC intern yet again next summer to Juvvalapalem, and spend more time interacting with the school children and teach topics related to health and hygiene. I would like to say my ‘many thanks’ to the TAC founders and staff for providing the opportunity to contribute to TAC’s mission and make the educational content available to the children at Juvvalapalem. My special thanks to Parivarthan foundation for helping me at every stage of my journey and my stay at Juvvalapalem.

In March 2012, TAC has launched its pilot program to teach a class of sixty 5th grade students over the course of 3 months. Students are divided into 6 groups of ten students each and every group has a 30-minutes long class twice a week.  The students work on lessons provided by Khan Academy. Since this school with its given funds cannot afford to provide Internet service to their computer lab, TAC has  networked all the computers and also helped establish a local education hotspot . This hotspot comes preloaded with educational resources like Khan Academy, ck12 and NomadEDU platform.   This Technology is aimed at linking the lessons taught in class by TFI with the video lessons available at Khan Academy.  The student will learn from assigned video lessons and practice with the provided exercises.
Teach A Class through this pilot program, aims to introduce students to the idea of using a computer for learning and bring awareness that technology can be integrated with traditional practices to produce effective teaching and learning methods.

Neil Dsouza, the co-founder of teach-a-class spoke at the first TEDxUlaanbaatar event held in Ulaanbaatar on August 20, 2011.
You can checkout more about the event here

The idea behind using khanacademy  on the hotspot was simple, you had one of the best STEM education materials at our disposal in the US ( not just the videos ) but 80% of the world which had either poor internet or no access to internet would spend the next 5-8 yrs not knowing about it. UNIMAGINABLE !!! . Some of the engineers on teachaclass program started porting the KA code to be fully deployable in a self contained NAS+Wireless solution ( check out www.nomadedu.org) and setting up these hotspots in remote towns around indonesia and mongolia.

From Cooking for kids : Chef duty at Verbiest Care Center, posted by Neil Dsouza on 10/14/2011 (28 items)

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From Lotus Children Center, posted by Neil Dsouza on 6/18/2011 (21 items)

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From Setting up the Lab., posted by Neil Dsouza on 5/20/2011 (14 items)

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