NEWS & EVENTS

Another Month, Another State, Another Pragya!

(Teacher Training at Pune, Maharashtra).
As Vision Empower (VE) continues to meet its goal of reaching 100 schools for the academic session 2022-23, we are training teachers from special schools every month. This month, we conducted a Pragya Teacher Training on the 12th and 13th of September at the Poona School and Home for Blind, Pune, Maharashtra. 22 teachers from 6 schools of Maharasthra, 5 from Pune and 1 from Mumbai, participated in the training aimed to equip teachers with accessible STEM teaching methodologies & resources.

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Teachers’ Day Celebration at IEPVD Tripura

September 5, 2022

The IEPVD Boys and Girls School at Agartala, Tripura celebrated Teachers' Day on 5th September. As Vision Empower closely works with the teachers and students from IEPVD, Sudipta- VE's School Coordinator was invited to the celebration by the students she regularly conducts VICT sessions with.

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Training Teachers of Tripura

August 29-30, 2022

Vision Empower conducted a two-day Pragya Teacher Training in hybrid mode, in IEPVD Boys’ and Girls’ School, Narsingarh, Agartala. The training was focused on foundational concepts of Algebra, Geometry and Science module. A session on Braille literacy with students was also conducted.

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Pragya Teacher Training At Tamil Nadu

August 25 - 26, 2022

Vision Empower conducted a Pragya Teacher Training workshop in collaboration with the Department of Special Education, Avinashilingam Institute for Home Science & Higher Education for Women in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu under the able guidance of Dr Victoria Naomi, Dean of Special Education, School of Education at the Institute.

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Becoming friends with Helen Keller via Hexis!

A comprehension reading activity was conducted by Vision Empower with students from The Karnataka Welfare Association For Blind (KWAB) on the occasion of Helen Keller Day. The students were divided into two groups for the reading activity. The first set of students were taken to a classroom where the VE coordinators handed the Hexis device to each one of them.

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VE & Mathruchhaya Join Hands For A Pragya Teacher Training

June 9-11, 2022

A three-day Pragya Teacher Training was conducted by VE in collaboration with Mathruchhaya Trust, Bangalore. A total of 27 teachers participated in person out of which 7 are sighted, 2 have low-vision and the rest 18 teachers are persons with visual impairment. 6 teachers participated online via zoom.

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Training the Teachers Of NAB

May 23-24, 2022

"We never thought numeracy concepts can be taught to children using Braille card games”,
said teachers of the National Association for the Blind (NAB), Haldwani after attending the teacher training.

Vision Empower conducted a Pragya Teacher training at NAB Haldwani, Uttarakhand. The sessions were conducted by Jyoti, Anshumaan and Rajagopalan from Vision Empower. Attended by 16 teachers, both sighted and visually impaired, the training focused on introducing them to interesting yet accessible ways maths, science and computational thinking can be taught to children with visual impairment.

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Your Story features Vidhya Y’s Story

As the first child to be born blind in Thirumagondanahalli village located on the outskirts of Bengaluru, Vidhya Y faced many challenges. Read this article written by Tenzin Norzom to learn how Vidhya came up with solutions to the obstacles she faced.

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A vision to guide the challenged – meet Vidhya Y from Karnataka – THE INDIAN EXPRESS

"A vision to guide the challenged"- VIDHYA Y'S STORY FEATURED IN THE INDIAN EXPRESS Mocked for choosing mathematics in her childhood and discouraged by several institutions and teachers against pursuing science, Vidhya Y defied all odds to not just bag gold medals in her Masters, but is today leading other visually-challenged people to taste success, through effective learning in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses.

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Stem Education: The Need For It To Be Experiential And Inclusive

A fireside chat by Vision Empower

The National Science Day is celebrated every year on 28th February in India to mark the contributions of scientists towards the development of the country. On this day, in 1928, Indian Physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman made an important discovery in the field of spectroscopy, which was later named after him – the Raman Effect.

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Science Quiz

VE conducted an online science quiz for students from grades 3 to 10 from all the schools VE engages with. There were over 140 students who answered the Science and Nemeth related questions in the quiz and over 16 students got all the answers correct.

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Electronic Braille Reader Hexis : The Creators

On International Braille Day 2022, Vision Empower expresses its gratitude to the co-creators of Hexis, Rajagopal N and Paul D’ Souza. Hexis is an electronic Braille reader which automatically converts text to Braille on a refreshable Braille display.

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Understanding braille on International Braille Day, 2022

IS BRAILLE STILL USEFUL? Understanding braille on International Braille Day, 2022

We have all heard or read about the inventor of the Braille script, Louis Braille. Louis was born on January 4 in 1809 in France and became blind after a childhood accident at the age of 3. But, he quickly mastered his new way of living. When Louis was only 15 years old, he created the Braille reading and writing system based on Charles Barbier’s night writing system (a note-taking system he invented of embossed dots to represent sounds).

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Behind The Scenes Of Accessibility

(International Day for Persons with Disabilities, 3rd Dec 2021) A rainbow, out of the many storms that the Covid-19 pandemic brought, has been the increased usage of platforms like zoom. While we’ve all talked about the zoom fatigue and the boredom people faced all day working from home, there is a brighter side too. Assistive technology platforms like this have played an important role in empowering people with various disabilities to become contributors in conferences and events where earlier they would be mere participants.

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Breaking Barriers For Women With Visual Impairment

November 26, 2021

(A talk by Vidhya Y in WSIS Forum 2022 Brainstorming Session) “Technology is a great enabler, it’s a necessity for women with visual impairment rather than a luxury”, says our co-founder Vidhya Y in a brainstorming discussion conducted by World Summit on the Information Society(WSIS).

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Trained to Teach

November 22-23, 2021

(A Pragya Teacher Training Session with the graduates of NIEPVD) Over 20 Bachelors in Education (B. Ed) students from the National Institute For The Empowerment Of Persons With Visual Disabilities (NIEPVD), Tamil Nadu, attended the training which focussed on introducing the fresh graduates to Computational Thinking concepts through games.

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Vidhya Y’s Journey Featured In ‘the Logical Indian’ Blog

From counting rice grains as a child to becoming the gold medalist of her batch in IIIT-B, read the story of Vision Empower’s co-founder who was told to take ‘easier’ subjects as a person with visual impairment. Get to know how she defied all the labels put on her for choosing to study Mathematics and is now making STEM education accessible for children with visual impairment through Vision Empower.

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Splendor Conference by Cilre on the Future of Education

November 18-20, 2021

Vidhya Y, the co-founder of Vision Empower participated in Splendor 2021, an International Virtual Conference conducted by Cilre. The 3-day conference, from 18th to 20th November 2021, comprised of various panel discussions, fireside chats, workshops, etc all revolving around the theme “Future of Education”.

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EMPOWER Assistive Technology Conference

October 28-30, 2021

Vision Empower (VE) participated in the 'EMPOWER Assistive Technology Conference' conducted by the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) from 28th to 30th October 2021.

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VICT Play Plan Challenge

Are you passionate about Computational Thinking? Would you like to challenge yourself and make your CSPathshala Computational Thinking problems accessible for the children with visual impairment?

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Workshop on Creation of Science and Math Text Books in Braille

Vision Empower in collaboration with Canara Bank Welfare Association (Matruchhaya) conducted an online workshop on the 1st of September 2021 for The Regional Braille Press, Rama Krishna Mission Ashram, Narendrapur (West Bengal), and National Institute for the Empowerment of Persons with Visual Disabilities (NIEPVD), Chennai. Trainers: Ms. Kalyani and Ms. Pushpaja from Matruchhaya

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Science through Inquiry and Research (STIR) competition Award

Rishi Vadhana, VE Educational Co-Ordinator was awarded the second prize for presenting her paper titled "Teaching of logical reasoning diagnosis for print-disabled students" at the Science through Inquiry and Research (STIR) competition hosted by Bishop Heber College, Trichy for participants who have enlivened their Project/Research based Learning.

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Online Pragya – Delhi VICT Teacher Training Report

June 25-26, 2021

Vision Empower in collaboration with Saksham conducted the first Delhi Online Computational Thinking for Visually Impaired curriculum (VICT) Teacher Training intervention for teachers of two special schools for the blind in New Delhi on 25th June and 26th June, 2021.

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Global Accessibility Day

Vision Empower celebrated Global Accessibility Day with two events. Awareness on usage of Screen Reader by persons with visual impairment and A Group Discussion based on Vidhya's TED talk. Great way to recognize the importance of Accessibility in our lives.

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What Assistive Technologies Can Do To Make STEM More Inclusive

By Joel P Joseph
The Wire Science

Entrepreneur Christina Wallace wrote in 2015, “for most people – myself included – the default [picture of a scientist] is probably a white man in a lab coat, hunched over a microscope.”

Thanks to many individuals, collectives and movements showing the mirror on racial, gender-based and caste-based discrimination in STEM, this stereotype is slowly changing. However, few still have promoted the inclusion of people with a disability in STEM.

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Nothing ‘special’ about these needs

To people with disabilities in India, STEM fields remain largely inaccessible. A glimmer of hope has come in the form of the National Education Policy 2020, but unless some serious gaps are addressed, progress is unlikely.

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Pragya Nov 2020

November 9 - 11, 2020

A three day online teacher training workshop Pragya’2020 was organized by Vision Empower on 9th, 10th and 11th of November....
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Foundation Day of Vision Empower : Celebrating 3 Years

We celebrated the Foundation Day of Vision Empower on 4th of October, 2020. Three years since being incorporated, Vision Empower has been very fortunate to have incredible team members, mentors, partners, student interns and volunteers without whose support we could not have implemented our pilot projects. Read the details and view the videos here.

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VE accepted as Primary member, Daisy Forum of India (DFI)

Vision Empower has been accepted as a Primary member of the Daisy Forum of India (DFI). On Saturday, 19th of September, Supriya was invited to present at the AGM of the DFI on the activities of VE and especially Subodha and its utility. The presentation was well received. VE joins this consortium to work alongside the members on various interventions to make accessible content for persons with visual impairment, especially in India.

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Visionary Ideathon

Visionary Ideathon is a 3-day event from 27th - 30th August by Project Sitara Foundation in collaboration with Vision Empower Trust. It is an opportunity for you to contribute towards science education for the visually impaired children of class 10 across India

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ICTD 2020 : Paper presentation

Jun 17, 2020

The paper "Conceptual Learning through Accessible Play: Project Torino and Computational Thinking for Blind Children in India", co-authoured by Gesu India, Microsoft Research India, Geetha Ramakrishna, Vision Empower, Joyojeet Pal, Microsoft Research India and Swami Manohar, Microsoft Research India, was presented at ICTD 2020 (Paper Session 4.1)

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Pragya January 2020

January 28 - 29, 2020

A two day Teachers’ training workshop Pragya’2020 was organized by Vision Empower, in collaboration with Mathruchhaya- Canara Bank Relief &...
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Anubhav 2019

September 20-21, 2019

Anubhav 2019 was designed based on information gathered over June 2018 – August 2019 from the VE school interventions which culminated in design of the 2 days of workshop on various learning activities.

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Making STEM accessible with the aid of Geometry Boxes

September 2, 2019

Vision Empower is sincerely grateful to Mr. Balaji Varadarajan for contributing to this endeavour of making STEM accessible, by donating geometry boxes to all the schools using funds he has earned for his contribution as a Programming language trainer for visually impaired persons.

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ANUBHAV 2018

March 25 - 28, 2018

Vision Empower and Vividha Trust organized Anubhav – a Science and Math summer camp for children of 5th grade for the visually impaired children in Bangalore.

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