Dear all,

Last year, we - the Indian GNU/Linux Users' Group - Kolkata Chapter, had conducted the highly successful [1] 2-month long weekend program on GCC programming workshops and tutorials at the Rajabazar Science College[2], University of Calcutta.

Recently there was a call for support and collaboration from the Institute of Open Technology and Applications (IOTA), an autonomous society that has been recently set up under the aegis of Dept of Information Technology, Govt of West Bengal. IOTA's mandate, afaik, is to identify cases and espouse the use and adoption of FOSS in the state of West Bengal. Towards that end, training in FOSS based technologies of high school teachers across the state, has been identified by the society as one of the courses for immediate action. Several training programs are in the offing. The teachers' training program at West Bengal State University (WBSUB), Barasat was a part of that.

Between 2nd and 4th October, 2008, 51 high school teachers belonging to 42 different schools from across the district of North 24 Parganas [3] attended the workshop. A team of six ILUG-CAL.ORG members gathered in Barasat (North 24 Parganas) from 4 different districts of WB, worked nearly against time to plan, execute and successfully deliver the program, with less that 20 hours of head-start before the event took off.

It was the first time that ILUG-CAL has been involved in directly training the high school teachers in using FOSS. For the detailed report and the associated data please go to http://indradg.randomink.org/blog/archives/124 .

cheers -indra

References:

[1] http://list.ilug-cal.org/pipermail/ilug-cal-discuss/2007-June/001363.html [2] http://santanu-sinha.blogspot.com/2007/06/workshop-on-gcc-at-rajabazar-scien... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_24_Parganas