Mumbai, 17th December 2015:
Essar Foundation, as a part of its ongoing CSR Knowledge Series, collaborated with Pratham Books to organise a two-day workshop on learning to use Storyweaver, a multilingual, open source digital platform for children’s stories. The workshop invited NGOs, educationists and teachers to the event, which was held at Equinox Business Park in Mumbai on 16-17 December 2015.
More than 60 participants, including representatives from Pratham Books, UNICEF, CHIP Education, The Tamarind Tree, Angel Express Foundation, Muktangan, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, QUEST and various other organisations, attended the workshop. They were joined by CSR representatives from JSW, Aditya Birla and Omkar Foundation.
The Platform
StoryWeaver is a multilingual, open source platform for children’s stories, which are all freely available. The platform hosts hundreds of stories in Indian and foreign languages. It invites readers to discover an endless stream of stories and encourages them to adapt the stories to local requirements.
Using StoryWeaver it is possible to:
READ: Thousands of free stories in multiple languages for every reading level and age group.
CREATE: Completely new stories by using the openly licensed illustrations.
TRANSLATE: Existing stories into more languages to ensure every child has good books to read in their mother tongue.
RELEVEL: Adapt a book to another reading level to cater to different reading needs.
CONNECT: With educators, librarians, authors, illustrators, translators, storytellers and other like-minded people to get recommendations, ideas and resources.
FIND: Stories, languages, people and resources.
This platform received overwhelming response from the community. It has the potential to grow and provide access to communities and children in far-flung corners of the country, especially in tribal areas where resources are always scarce.
Pratham Books is a non-profit organisation that publishes affordable, high quality books for children. StoryWeaver is an open source digital repository of multilingual stories for children. With StoryWeaver, Pratham Books' goal is to bring stories to every child in as many languages as possible.
With a mission to disseminate knowledge and resources widely, Essar Foundation continues to collaborate and create platforms for interesting initiatives that promote creative learning among children in India
