IT@School Project
editThe Government of Kerala's Department of Education has an program to improve information technology education and the use of information technology in education called IT@School Project. IT@School and the Malayalam Wikipedia community have been working together in a pioneering way for the past 3 years in a mutually beneficial partnership to pursue common goals through joint projects. IT@School helped Malayalam Wikipedia grow by providing platforms for WikiAcademies and supporting the publishing of select articles of Malayalam Wikipedia in a CD project. IT@ School project then transformed into KITE.
The Malayalam WikiCommunity supported IT@School to create a School Wiki - which included the details of schools in Kerala. The community also provided directions when Wikipedia was included as a study topic in the school curriculum. A healthy number of active editors on Malayalam Wikipedia are teachers and students (including school children) who were introduced and familiarised with editing through the efforts of IT@School. The Malayalam WikiCommunity is pleased to announce that this strong collaboration is now being taken to the next level by initiating the Malayalam Wikipedia Education Programme.
The idea was that encyclopedic articles about the topics associated with schools and their local areas (panchayat, town, district, etc.) would be developed in School Wiki and this content, after confirming reaching a certain level can be transferred to Malayalam Wikipedia. School students would collect data related to their locality and publish them on School Wiki.But the local encyclopedia project could not be taken forward as students and teachers did not have working experience with wiki. Also, there was inadequate effort to structure a Malayalam Wikipedia Education Program to introduce, teach, support and motivate participants to edit on wiki.
