Teachers in Kerala to get laptops and netbooks

Kerala government has decided to give laptops and net books to the teachers in kerala as part of the IT@school program. More than 50,000 of the teachers are to benefit from this scheme. The price of the laptops Rs 17,770 which is less than 37 percent of the current market. And the net books will be available for Rs 11,450 which comes out to be 36 percent less than the market value.

IT@School executive director, Mr Anwar Sadath told that they want laptops and net books to be an integral part of the teacher's hand bag as they are carrying a lunch box with them. The main attraction of this program is that, the laptops and net books are coming with a warranty of 3 years.The laptops and netbooks will be pre-loaded with the IT@School's version of Edubuntu, office packages, graphics applications and other educational softwares.

The laptops will be with Celeron M 900 to Pentium Dual Core with 2 GB DDR RAM, 160 GB hard drive, integrated DVD RW. It will be inabled with wireless facility and 2 hours of battery backup.

In the case of netbooks, the processor will be Intel Atom N455@1.66 GHz with 1 GB DDR RAM, 160 GB hard disc. This will also be enabled with wireless facility and a battery backup of 6 hours.

For a teacher to get qualified for this scheme, the head of the institution should certify that the teacher has received a successful training in information technology (IT). Teachers of lower primary and upper primary sections who are yet to receive IT training can also participate in the scheme, provided that they give an undertaking that they will get trained in IT before June this year.

More details of this scheme is available on the website of IT@School www.itschool.gov.in.