At the main TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in LA in February, Prof Sugata Mitra was awarded a $1m (£638,000) prize fund to set up a series of cloud schools.

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"A school in the cloud is basically a school without physical teachers. We need this because in many places you can't get teachers or the teachers are very bad," he said. Initially he intends to set up five cloud schools, three in India and two in the UK, near the University of Newcastle where he teaches. The remotest of the locations is Korakati, a village in eastern India, where he hopes to build a school in the next four months.

It will be very different from a conventional school - a glass pod filled with computers and with one large screen to allow moderators to Skype in and play a role in the education of the children. The moderators will be drawn from Prof Mitra's "cloud granny" programme, which is already up and running in the UK and India.

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For him, the key part of the project will be to let the children self-organise. There will be no timetables or curriculum and much of the learning will be left to the children. "We will let 300 children in on the first day and all hell will break loose. But gradually they will start to organise themselves," he said.

The model for the schools is drawn from the hole-in-the-wall computers that Prof Mitra set up in the slums of India in 1999. The computers came with no instructions and were simply left for children to explore for themselves. The way they developed skills amazed Prof Mitra. He expects that a similar pattern will emerge in the cloud schools.