SAKSHAM - A CASE STUDY
A project to digitize all classrooms of Pune district schools for students with hearing impairment. There are 25 government recognized schools in Pune District for students with hearing impairment with a total of 2,300 underprivileged students studying there.
Teaching special children is a challenge for teachers.
These students hail from very poor families remain aloof from the society.
Rotary Club of Pune Katraj has lent a helping hand by providing eLearning setup under its project “Saksham’ (Empowerment).
This initiative was initially started on experimental basis three years back for a school having students with hearing impairment.
Buoyed by the success of the project, with the help of a Rotary grant and funded by a renowned industrialist, ‘Saksham’ came to fruition in the year 2016-17.
Club members visited all 25 schools of the district to recognize specific needs. Teachers and students were taken into confidence and sensitized on the proposal.
Syllabus was developed specially for these children with animated visual content.
Pune has thus become the first digital district in India which has all government schools for hearing impaired students, completely digitized.
111 such eLearning sets were formally handed over to the schools at the hands of renowned scientist Padmavibhushan Dr. Raghunath Mashelkar in 2016.
All the students were overjoyed and teachers expressed their heartfelt gratitude for project Saksham.
A 3-day activity based Teachers Training Program was organized to train the teachers through lectures, presentations & demonstrations.
A strong foundation has already been laid. ‘Rotary News’ gave a 4 page news coverage to this project while Rotary International bestowed ‘Significant Achievement Award 2016-17’ upon Saksham, one of the prestigious and exclusive awards given only to a few. Thus a brave project came into being which will benefit students immensely.
