New interactive tool for digital studies launched in Kerala by Education Minister

Thiruvananthapuram: In order to make it easier for instructors to use high-tech equipment in the classroom, Kerala General Education Minister V. Sivankutty on Saturday unveiled the "KITE Board" application, a multipurpose, device-independent, FOSS-based, interactive tool.

According to Sivankutty, the KITE Board is the State's most recent contribution. The State has already sparked a digital revolution in the education sector by utilising only free software, and the new addition will aid in establishing engaging, modern learning environments in classrooms.

The KITE Board also facilitates the storage of content written on Blackboard by the teacher in PDF format, a feature which would also benefit students who are unable to attend a class.

It also enables the recording of activities done on the Board using screen recording.

The classroom activities such as science experiments can be captured using the built-in camera of the Laptop which can then be shown through the KITE Board.

K. Anvar Sadath, CEO, of KITE said they had made necessary arrangements to ensure the availability of the KITE Board application in all laptops in schools as a simple upgrade similar to the deployment of E-Language Lab software.

The new application would be familiarised to all School IT Co-ordinators during the 'Techie Teacher' residential IT training which would be conducted in October.

The 'KITE Board', developed by Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE), is a Free Software (FOSS), based application which requires no specific hardware like costly interactive boards that are available in the market and can be simply used as part of the KITE/GNU Linux 20.04 Operating System available in around two lakh laptops in 16,000 schools, deployed as part of the Hi-Tech projects.

By using a KITE Board, teachers would be able to write and type using a laptop and can also project them in classrooms using the projector, similar to using a Blackboard.

It is a unique feature of the application that teachers could pre-load the resources such as video, images and presentations from the Samagra portal in the KITE Board, which can then be used either online or offline as needed.

Further, the KITE Board also facilitates the usage of online resources such as Wikipedia.

With inputs from IANS