The district administration’s award-winning e-jagrata programme, which seeks to train school children in safe, secure and effective use of the Internet, is entering its fourth phase, which will be inaugurated by the State Police Chief Loknath Behera on the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) campus at Infopark on July 5.
TCS has been extending technical support to the project, while the State Bank of India is collaborating financially.
District Collector K. Mohammed Y. Safirulla, who guides the initiative, said 12,577 high school students from 101 government schools in Ernakulam, Aluva, Muvattupuzha and Kothamangalam educational districts would be trained in this phase. Of this, 3,843 students, who are in Class VIII, were completely new to the project. While 303 students would be trained by TCS, the remaining 12,274 would be trained by these student trainers. In the first leg of the fourth phase, 130 Class VIII students from 65 schools in Ernakulam and Aluva would be trained. By the third week of July, students from 36 schools in Muvattupuazha and Kothamangalam regions would be trained at TCS.
Besides basic training, they would also receive advanced computer training including in blogging. And, by the end of September, school-based internal training would commence.
Rolled out as an innovative internet security awareness programme, e-jagrata covered about 101 government schools initially. It was expanded to cover 161 aided schools in the second phase and the third phase covered 101 government schools and 51 aided schools.
The project also seeks to make effective use of the smart classrooms set up in government and aided schools as part of a plan to improve the quality of education. “It encourages students to be safe Internet users and responsible digital citizens. The programme covers a range of topics including safe use of Internet, gaming, social media, safe mobile use, the positives of Internet, cyber threats, cyber crimes, cyber laws, employment opportunities, cloud computing, android development and ethical hacking,” he said.
The programme was awarded at the international education summit in 2017 and at the Smart City conference in Ajmer in 2018 in the ‘Innovation in IT’ segment besides the Skoch Award most recently.