Amna Singh, Editorial Consultant (Digital), Pratham Books writes about the recent StoryWeaver workshop with students and teachers from the VIDYA Foundation in Mumbai.

It all began a couple of months ago with the Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver workshop in Mumbai. Volunteers from the VIDYA foundation participated in this workshop and fell in love with StoryWeaver and how! They experimented with our user-friendly platform and created books by themselves like 'Am I Alone'  and 'Nanni’s Birthday Gift’ . Teachers also initiated the students of the foundation into the StoryWeaver world which led to the creation of 'Gabbar is Back'. The enthusiastic group of VIDYA teachers decided to share this magic with their VIDYA team peers.

So on a crisp Saturday morning on the greens of the IIT campus, Mumbai a bunch of curious children,  a few equally wide-eyed teachers and StoryWeaver got together. 

40 students from Gyanmandir school and teachers from various other schools in the vicinity gathered together in a classroom to learn all about StoryWeaver: open source, multilingual digital platform of Pratham Books. The enthusiastic teachers of VIDYA foundation took them through all the aspects of StoryWeaver - right from reading to re-levelling. Participants read stories out loud, created funny tales and worked in groups to explore more and then some more. The ever growing number of stories, the rich bank of illustrations and the come-do-it-yourself access and design of StoryWeaver, was all at their fingertips, helping their imagination get wings. 

Would you like a little StoryWeaver magic? If your organisation is interested in conducting a StoryWeaver workshop for educators drop us a line at [email protected] and we'll get back to you.

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At Pratham Books, we believe in the power of stories – good stories. For well over a decade we have strived hard to reach children across India with a variety of award-winning stories across 18 Indian languages. With our digital crowd-sourcing platform – StoryWeaver we now share the power of stories with a global community of educators, parents, authors, illustrators and translators.

StoryWeaver is a digital repository of openly-licensed, multilingual children's stories. It allows its users to read, create and translate stories into Indian and international languages in the hope that children across the world can read quality stories in a languages of their choice. .

StoryWeaver is looking for an intern for our Digital Content  

Project Details

Migration of Pratham Books stories in multiple languages in digital formats onto StoryWeaver

• Working on our language content for StoryWeaver

• Publishing our stories on digital platform by ensuring a visually appealing layout

• Working with external agencies and proofreaders.

• Uploading books on StoryWeaver which involves tagging stories and images in a way that makes it accessible to users

Are you the intern we're looking for?

This is the perfect project if you're a college student or a graduate looking to add some work experience to your resume.

The ideal candidate will

1. Have good understanding of English and any one (or more) of the following  languages: Kannada, Tamil and Telugu.

2. Have an eye for editing and love for languages and children’s stories

3. Works well with a team

The internship will be for a 3-month period and the intern will receive an honorarium. The role requires the intern to be based out of Bangalore and work from our office.

Please send your resume to [email protected] with 'Intern - Digital Content for StoryWeaver' in the subject line of the email.

We look forward to hearing from you!

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Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver is one of four organisations taking part in  DataKind Bangalore's Sprint. The first step in the Sprint was a Project Accelerator which was held on June 10, 2018 which saw  45 participants including volunteers, DataKinders and Non-Profit partners come together to discuss their projects and present a problem statement. The participating NGOs were Pratham Books, Open City, Safe City and Daksh.

Pratham Books' problem statement was 'helping users discover the right content, faster'.  13 volunteers signed up to help find ways to solve this problem statement with our team. The afternoon was spent in brainstorming ideas and understanding the problem statement further. The volunteers also came up with a set of next steps.

Sahil Kuchlous, one of the youngest volunteers on the team had this to say:

"I chose to attend the Data Kind event because I had recently been learning about various data analytical algorithms and techniques, and wanted to find a place where I could learn to apply them in a real-world application. I chose to work with Pratham Books because I felt like the end product they were expecting was very clear and had many interesting approaches. At first, I was apprehensive about attending the event because I knew that it would be mostly adults with much more experience than me attending, but it was a pleasant surprise to see how welcoming and accomodating everyone was to me. I really enjoyed the experience, and hope to follow the project through."

Over the next few weeks the volunteers will meet for Data Jams as part of the Sprint.

Purvi Shah, Head of Digital Projects, Pratham Books is excited about the solutions that will emerge from this collaboration. "At StoryWeaver we  are very grateful to a large number of volunteers who have signed up for the project. Insights from data can play a significant role in scaling social initiatives and we are happy to partner with DataKind."

If you’d like to sign up as a volunteer join DataKind Bangalore’s slack channel #pratham_books to actively participate in various discussions and to join the next set of events.

 

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