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Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Oct 15, 2006
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Web resource to spread literacy

Anand Parthasarathy

Google, UNESCO and Frankfurt Book Fair join hands

Gooogle's literacy web resource

Bangalore: The international Frankfurt Book Fair, which concluded in Germany, last week, has seen the organisers join hands with two other agencies to launch a global literacy initiative.

The Fair's literacy campaign, LitCam, has partnered with Google and UNESCO to create ``The Literacy Project'' — a web-based resource for teachers, students — and anyone interested in the promotion of reading and education. The site is hosted at www.google.com/literacy.

It helps with a search for books and academic resources on literacy, links to blogs by like-minded organisations or individuals and helps locate instructional material including videos. ``A global problem deserves a global solution,'' says Karin Plotz, LitCam's Director of Education.

An interesting literacy initiative with an India angle is PlanetRead which uses Same-Language Subtitling of Bollywood film songs to spread literacy. Viewers find it easy to relate to film songs and quickly learn the language when the subtitles follow the words of the song. The U.S.-based non-profit organisation was founded by Brij Kothari who built on the SLS technique, first co-developed by him at the IIM, Ahmedabad. Google will now support PlanetRead as part of its new literacy initiative.

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