Gurugram: Samsung, India’s most admired brand, has introduced its new flagship global citizenship programme Samsung Smart School at Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya (JNV) schools across the country. The CSR programme is part of the Samsung vision of ‘Together for Tomorrow! Enabling People’, aims to create young leaders of tomorrow by giving less-privileged students in India access to the benefits of digital education and its transformative innovations.
The programme is being piloted at ten JNV schools in its first year. Samsung Smart Schools have been set up in JNV schools in Varanasi, Gwalior, Raipur, Udaipur, Kangra, Sambalpur, Faridabad, Dehradun, Patna and Dhanbad. Many of these schools are located in remote rural districts around these cities.
Every Samsung Smart School has two smart classrooms each of which is equipped with the latest digital infrastructure, including an 85-inch Samsung Flip interactive digital board that replaces the traditional blackboard, a 55-inch Samsung Flip that students can use to participate in lectures, quizzes, classwork and project work, and 40 Samsung Galaxy Tabs for students to use for self-study. In addition, the classrooms also have a printer, a server PC, a tablet charging station and power backup.
Through the Samsung Smart School programme, students will be able to improve their learning abilities and understanding of critical concepts in the classrooms through interactive digital teaching methods that teachers have been trained on. The pilot at 10 JNV schools will cover over 5,000 students, of which 40 per cent are girls and around 260 teachers.
“We are very happy to have Samsung as our partner under CSR for digital education. The smart classrooms, as part of the Samsung Smart School programme, are helping improve student participation and engagement. I am confident that a programme like this will bring a positive impact on society and become a benchmark for digital education in the future,” said Vinayak Garg, Commissioner, Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti.
“Samsung helps young people around the world gain access to better education and learning opportunities. Samsung Smart School programme strengthens our commitment to our vision of #PoweringDigitalIndia. This global citizenship initiative is closely tied with India’s development agenda and implemented in close partnership with the government to ensure wider reach and impact among less-privileged students,” said Partha Ghosh, Vice President, Corporate Citizenship, Samsung India.
Apart from the infrastructure support, Samsung Smart School will also enable digital learning for students in these schools through multiple touchpoints such as teacher training, providing meaningful and relevant educational content and equipping these schools with solutions for interactive and participative learning.
Samsung has provided digital content for all classes from Grade 6 to 12 as per the CBSE curriculum to enable teachers to use these classrooms more effectively and enhance student learning through an interactive and immersive learning process.
As part of the programme, regular teacher training has been built to enhance the skillsets of teachers and to help them prepare a better plan for delivering textbook content in a digital, interactive learning format. These teachers, who are the flag bearers of the Samsung Smart School programme, are making teaching fun, engaging and participative for students.
Under Samsung’s global citizenship vision of ‘Together for Tomorrow! Enabling People,’ Samsung seeks to empower the next generation to achieve their full potential and pioneer positive social changes. Samsung believes in using innovation to positively transform communities and create a better life for people through its citizenship initiatives. 
Empowering youth through education is one of the best ways we can prepare our young people to boldly face the world of the future.
Samsung Electronics runs three citizenship programmes globally – Samsung Smart School, Samsung Innovation Campus and Solve for Tomorrow – through which it is empowering the leaders of tomorrow and equipping them with the tools they will need to realise meaningful change.