Rethinking of "Empowering Marathi Schools"
Like most other Indian language-medium schools, Marathi schools are experiencing a drastic decline of students. To address these grave problem a day long seminar was organised at S. M. Joshi Sabhagriha, Pune. CIS-A2K member Abhinav Garule attended this event to share how teachers could encourage students to contribute to Marathi Wikipedia.
Day by day number of students in Marathi Schools is decreasing. Yashwantrao Chavan Pratishthan (यशवंतराव चव्हाण प्रतिष्ठान) and Marathi Shala Tikavalya Pahijet (Facebook Group) have planned to discuss about addressing these issues. Former Director of Education of the Government of Maharashtra Mr. Vasant Kalpande has been invited to chair the seminar and share activity based learning that could help solve problems of the Marathi schools. Abhinav is planning to share how the teachers could use Wikipedia as a learning tool and encourage their students to edit and learn about various topics of interest.
Thanks to the organisers that they provided me a slot for sharing about editing Marathi Wikipedia. I started my presentation with an inspiring video of long-time Marathi Wikimedian Abhay Natu which tells a lot of his experiences of editing Marathi Wikipedia. I demonstrated basics of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects and demonstrated digitization using Google's OCR tool with some of the participants. The audience was quite interested to know about verifiability of the Wikipedia content. Yashwantrao Chavan Pratishthan is interested in organising Wikipedia workshops in different cities of Maharashtra. We are planning to organise the next meeting with Yashwantrao Chavan Pratishthan spokesperson in this week to take this forward.
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