Bengaluru-based social education start-up Meghshala Trust, supported by Tata Trusts, has launched the Meghshala (meaning ‘school on the cloud’) offline mobile app on Google Play Store for the Android platform.

The app is the latest in Meghshala’s efforts to transform the government education system. The app empowers teachers with the necessary tools and resources to create classroom learning experiences that are engaging and interactive.

It is preloaded with over 2,500 of Meghashala’s ‘TeachKits’, aligned to the Karnataka State curriculum for Science, Math, English and Social Studies.

The Teachkits, which are a part of the app, contain multimedia lessons divided into two primary components – student slides and teacher instructions. The student slides include images, videos, text and questions that students can directly engage with.

The teacher instruction slides are visible only to teachers, and provide detailed support to implement the lesson. This includes suggestions on how to conduct each part of the lesson, the rationale for certain pedagogic practices, and additional information that can be used to enhance the lesson.

Owing to low-connectivity and an audience that wasn’t very proficient with technology, the offline app was initially loaded manually onto tablet computers. As a result, its reach was limited to 650 teachers in 200 government schools spread across nine districts of Karnataka. Meghshala, however, aims to empower 100,000 teachers by the year 2020.

V R Mehta, Trustee, Tata Trusts, said, “Our endeavour, at Tata Trusts is to expedite and intensify the scale and impact of community focused interventions by leveraging the power of technological innovations to improve the quality of life of people. We are proud to be supporting a young organization like Meghshala and convinced that our classrooms will transform into vibrant learning spaces. We are very impressed at what Meghshala has been able to achieve in three years and also their dreams to scale it across the country.”

Speaking on the occasion, Manoj Kumar, Head – Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Tata Trusts, said, “At Tata Trusts, we believe that technology innovations can really bring about a positive change in the lives of people. With Meghshala, we are trying to create an innovative EdTech solution that would address the problem of teachers’ enablement in India. We hope that these teach kits with their highly contextualised and local language content will provide government school students with world class education.”

Jyoti Thyagarajan, Co-Founder and Managing Trustee of Meghshala Trust, said, “This app is a culmination of 3 years of hard work by a dedicated group of amazing teachers and educators. It is exciting, promising, hopeful and we are eagerly looking forward to reaching 50,000 teachers by the end of the year. None of this would have been possible without the generous support from Tata Trusts. They have been the strength behind our vision.

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