The Shilpa Sayura Project was presented to the Top Management and Officials of National Institute of Education (NIE) www.nie.lk.
Dr. I.L Ginige (Deputy DG), Mr. Jayasuriya (Director ICT) and many other Educational Experts and Section Directors of NIE was present.
It was an important milestone in Shilpa Sayura Initiative as it received high recognition from NIE, the top most institution of National Education.
Shilpa Sayura Concept, CMS and Shilpa Sayura Content was presented and we made a brief awareness of ICTA e-SDI , Nenasala and our findings at ICT in Rural Schools.
The NIE Officials greatly appreciated ICTA-eSDI and Shilpa Sayura Efforts to develop rural education standards.
We presented content in depth as well as methods used to create content map from NIE Syllabus, Teacher Guides and Text Books. We presented them methods to used to provide interaction, student involvement. We showed them random content in Science, Math , Art , History as examples to display content and its depth.
We also showed them how content can be access from Syllabus Menu as well as content map. We showed them facilities made available to students to comment and rate the content. We also showed them some rare indegenepus content
They highly appreciated ICTA -eSDI and e Fusion initiative that has set a foundation of Cariculam Content in Sinhala Unicode, which is a timley need .
They also commended the NIE syllabus based menu and appreciated the depth and presentation methods. They said that Shilpa Sayura is quite inline with the changes of education policy they are making these days. They like to have Shilpa Sayura in Schools, specially in the rural communities where computers available even with out Internet access.
They also mentioned that they have got good feedback from Teachers using Nenasala about Shilpa Sayura. With this presentation, we are quite happy that NIE accepted Shilpa Sayura as a timely needed and quite useful product in ICT based eduction. They also said that they will provide best of their, support, content expertise and current content (Raw) for Shilpa Sayura.
During the discussion they mentioned that they would like us to include content for teachers in Shilpa Sayura (Lesson Plans , Teachers Handbooks produced by NIE). Dr. Mr. Ginige advised us to include content for teachers, so that teachers can use them at Nenasala.
When we mentioned about 7 schools we implemented Shilpa Sayura with Nenasala Support, They realised how nenasala can be a HR for School ICT development. A recent circular by Mini.Ed allows Schools to develop partnerships with schools to conduct ICT training and share revenue. A possible way Nenasala can progress using school resources.
We also updated Shilpa Sayura progress and how EVS programme has helped it. We also mentioned that having content available is not adequate to develop e-Learning. A development, review and activities are needed to transform traditional learners to e-learners.
Dr. Ginige had a discussion with Mr. Y.S Ratnayake from Shilpa Sayura Teachers Group about content and teachers group activity.
As well as we pointed them the important using unicode which allows uniform distribution, sharing and updating using databases. We also volunteered to assist them to implement unicode in NIE.
With this presentation and recent visits to deep south we are thinking of Shilpa Sayura Phase II, which will involve replicating Shilpa Sayura, Creating Content on Demand (ICT, English, Science and Math etc.) as well extending it to unemployed youth for e-Leaning that would reduce unemployment.
Finally we are quite happy that years of our work got recognized by NIE . We also take this opportunity to thank all of you for evething you have done to make Shilpa Sayura progress to this level with in a short time period of one year. We would like to request your support further to develop Shilpa Sayura as a National Education Project.
Niranjan Meegammana
