Lorem Ipsum

What is Lorem Ipsum? Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. Why do we use it? It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like). In 2020, CETE started an initiative called COOL (Connected Open Online Learning). It reached out to schoolteachers, students, teacher educators and in-training teachers to offer a wide range of resources to help different stakeholders in transitioning to online modes of teaching and learning. Available in English and five Indian languages, the COOL programme draws from the Trusts’ ongoing work using technology in education, namely CLIx or the Connected Learning Initiative. The five initiatives under COOL include: 1. An online course for teachers on Technology for Connected Learning 2. Resources for teacher education are resources for B. Ed. students (mapped onto the NCTE curriculum and made available on TISSx, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences learning platform) as well as webinars for teacher educators and M. Ed. students 3. Repository of Open Educational Resources (OERs) in multiple languages 4. Multilingual webinars for students and teachers 5. Research and ground assessments to understand field realities and voices from the field Building teacher capacity in technology CLIx’s foundational beliefs include promoting and enabling active learning, along with teachers' ownership for the online learning process. Neither objective could be actualised during the pandemic because schools had shut down. The project team had to quickly come up with new practices and viable technologies. In response, CLIx planned online ed-tech campaigns in its three intervention states – Mizoram, Chhattisgarh and Telangana. The objective was to increase the reach of CLIx and other OERs through the online training of various stakeholders like teachers, teacher educators, sectoral officers, headmasters, students, cluster resource persons, etc. The RTICT Modular Course: Managing an ICT Lab was offered to a select group of teachers. Two hundred and twenty-five teachers were selected through the state and district educational offices. The lab management course, offered on TISSx, aimed to help those selected acquire competencies related to the installation, maintenance and management of an ICT lab on their own. It also helped them get an understanding of the basics of computer hardware and software, eventually helping them in their teaching-learning process. Field facilitators also designed activities and engaged students in smaller groups.