The state of Rajasthan is one of the pioneers in the country when it comes to innovative interventions in education. Since the last three decades, multiple governments and non-government programs have played an important role in shaping the school education system and its processes. In recent years, the state government started showing tremendous interest in ICT (Information and Communication Technology) projects. While technology has already established its substantial presence in high-end private schools, it is still struggling to integrate within the public education system in India. Multiple factors like lack of infrastructure, low tech skills, perception about technology and vastness of the scale make it exceedingly difficult for tech-based projects to create any significant impact.

Project Pragyan is an ambitious attempt by EdIndia Foundation in collaboration with Rajasthan Council for School Education, to address some of these issues. Started as a field project in 100 schools, the project is now reaching out to 30,000 teachers through the Pragyan App.

Unlike most of the tech-based interventions, Pragyan is a teacher-centric project, which enables teachers to improve teaching practices with a significant focus on leveraging tech tools in classroom delivery. Committed to developing scalable models, project Pragyan is currently using tech-based innovations in government schools of Rajasthan.

Some highlights of the program are given below:

• Mobile App for Teachers: 30000+ teachers in Rajasthan and Mumbai are
  using ‘Pragyan App’ regularly to get content mapped teaching ideas and resources. These resources include lesson plans, worksheets, and animated videos. Pragyan App also provides need-based capacity building sessions for teachers which they can access whenever and from wherever they want.
• Live Sessions for Teachers: Mobile-based live training sessions for
  teachers, ensuring regular in-service support without taking the teacher out of the school.
• Smart Classrooms: Pragyan program brings a smart classroom environment at less than 200$ per class (one-tenth the typical cost) and builds the teacher’s capacity to leverage technology in a blended pedagogy. Pragyan has set up these smart classrooms in 100 government schools of Rajasthan. Primary teachers of these schools are trained through workshops and school visits to ensure the right and effective use of audio-visuals in primary classes.

Project Pragyan has helped its project teachers to achieve an average of 30% improvement in their teaching skills when compared with the baseline data.

Encouraged by the positive trends in its initial years, Pragyan is planning to reach out teachers of all 33 districts of Rajasthan through Pragyan App by the end of 2021.