Daily Times

PESHAWAR: The government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has decided to launch Digital Literacy Programme and during next three years will impart training to 2,41,600 students of Grade 6 to Grade 12.

The programme is framed for 38 schools of the merged districts and 1170 high and higher secondary schools of the remaining districts.

In a statement issued here on Thursday, the Provincial Minister for Elementary and Secondary Education, Shahram Khan Tarakai said that beside up-gradation of the IT Labs of the selected schools an incubation centre would also be set up at each divisional headquarters.

In these incubation centres 10 selected teams from schools would be represented by two members in each team.

These teams would be provided six months training. The during training the under training students would be paid a stipend of Rs.15,000/- per month. An annual competition would also be arranged among these trained students. The winner and runner-up teams would be awarded cash prizes of Rs.20,00,000/ -and Rs 1,00.00,000/- respectively.

In initial phase, the programme would be launched in the selected schools of 10 districts including Peshawar, Mardan, Charsadda, Nowshera, Swabi, Abbottabad, Mansehra, Kohat and Dir Lower and later it would be expanded to more districts.

A Project Management Unit (PMU) has also been established for the programme and the selection of trainers is also completed, who will train IT teachers through the office of the concerned District Education Office and will also monitor the training process. There will be at least four classes of digital literacy every week.

The provincial minister further elaborated that during the training of the students of selected schools, they would be taught digital literacy, problem solving, algorithm, MS Office, scratch, web-literacy, app inventor, social media ethics and coding.

The IT teachers would also be imparted training on these selected IT skills while for creation of an environment of competition, campuses would also be established during winter and summer vacations and contests of programming and gaming would also be organized.