My return to the city of Mysore after three years is fraught with some trepedition and much anticipation. In parallel to Bengaluru, Mysore has been experiencing the increasing presence of the IT industry which has brought with it changes in its cultural and social contours and I'm not sure what I feel about these shifts. As my colleague, Chloe, and I weave our path through the city in a rickety auto looking forward to our reason for being there, the collective listening of the 4^th anniversary broadcast of the Kelu Sakhi programme of IT for Change, the new neon lights of the growing city glower all around.

In a proposal to RMSA (Rashtriya Madhyamika Shikshana Abhiyana), IT for Change (ITfC), suggested the creation of Subject Teachers Forums (Kalika Balaga) across the state. And to back this initiative, we had to confirm to RMSA that the educational tools required for creating such forums could be made available in the existing set-up.

On 7^th March 2011, almost the entire office was mobilised to help the TCoL team managing the Bal Mela they organised at GKHPS Akkitimanahalli (Bengaluru). The event aimed at introducing the children to computers, but some children were too young to be able to do so; which is why we all searched deep into our souvenirs to find games and activities which did not require too much knowledge of language, were fun, not competitive, and full of learnings. Body paintings, circles of bubbles, and races.

Last week, the TCoL team participated in the Bal Mela which was organised by American India Foundation (AIF) in GMPS Puttenhalli. This was our first major event with children as part of the TCoL project. We were excited but at the same time did not know what to expect and decided to go with the flow.

Till now, we are confident of how the teachers use technology and educational tools that we were training them on. We were sure that children would love them as well and at the event decided to start out with the crowd-puller KGeography. (KGeography is a free and open source educational tool which helps to learn location of capitals and states from countries all across the world. It is a fun interactive tool which presents questions in a quiz form.) Once we set up the projector and had all the computers in the lab running, the students were playing with the tool and trying to figure out the locations of the different states of India.

Yesterday, IT for Change, as part of the TCoL (Teachers' Communities of Learning) programme conducted a BalMela at GKHPS Akkitimanahalli, Bengaluru. The programme ran all day. It began with the children experiencing a puppet show by an independent puppeteer Jayasree who set the tone for the day, with bright-eyed children eager to explore and learn.

I facilitated the last batch of a two-day workshop the programme of the Policy Planning Unit (PPU) of the Education Department, Government of Karnataka, ‘Master Trainers on Public Software educational tools’, organised on 17-18 February at the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) premises. Majority of the participants were Block Resource Persons (BRPs) who came from all parts of Karnataka and had a degree in science and mathematics.

Last Thursday, I went to visit one of the field projects with some of IT for Change's field workers. The Kishori Chitrapata (images by adolescent girls) project has now been running for eighteen months – its aim is to address the learning needs of out of school adolescent girls or kishoris. At the end of the technical part of the training, the team faced drop-outs and decided to meet every kishori to ask them why the energy levels had gone lower. From those video interviews, the idea of organising a festival came out, where the entire team from Mysore would be present and all girls and women would come dressed in sarees.

In January 2011, I made a field trip to Delhi to study the Mission Convergence programme (Samajik Suvidha Sangam) of the Government of Delhi. The objective of this programme is to 'provide welfare services in an integrated manner to under-privileged citizens in an efficient, transparent, convenient, friendly and cost effective manner; to implement the action plan for welfare schemes in collaboration with community based organisations (CBOs) [...] and to promote the empowerment of women' (Mission Convergence, 2010). My research goal was to study the role of ICTs in public service delivery and community development, and in facilitating structural reform towards accountable governance.

"The Teacher's Communities of Learning (TCoL) Project conducted a "Camera as Teaching Learning Material" workshop recently in GMPS Puttenahalli. This workshop was a unique one for the TCoL team as it was the first time we were attempting to introduce other ICTs (camera) as a Teaching-learning material tool. It was also the first time the teachers were experiencing this kind of workshop and it was the first time the CCID team was coming in to train teachers and help us as resource persons in this workshop.