Tamil Nadu - Madurai   

Madurai school team wins international competition

Congratulations: The victorious team.

MADURAI: A team of students from a Madurai school with its technical wizardry, joining with teams of international students, has won the ‘The Global Virtual Classroom Contest, 2008-09’ (GVC) in which they have built a free, educational website that aspires to empower, enable and connect students around the world by integrating technology into classrooms.

Vasanthi Lajapathi, a class XII student of C. S. Ramachary Memorial Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Tirunagar, Madurai, coordinated her team with the ones led by Janet Barnstable, Percy Julian Middle School, Oak Park Elementary, USA; and Tim Alguire and Stephen MacKinnon, Athens District High School, Canada. They won the Gold Award in the secondary school category under the ‘Special Recognition for Helping Focus.’

They have built a website about water called ‘World of Water,’ which has information on water cycle, desalination, aquatic life, pollution, global warming and more. The website has contents of exceptional research on the topic thus providing visitors excellent information and resources. Quizzes and crosswords are part of the site. A “water inspired art” with a critique on it by an artist named Martin Waugh is also there. GVC conducts this contest annually aimed at teaching students three essential skills of cross-cultural communication, collaboration and computer skills. The 2008/2009 contests saw close to 2,000 students from 75 schools across 23 different countries participating in it. The teams comprising three schools from around the world battled it out to design websites. The contest had its task cut out in the form of major challenges like communicating with all three schools, encouraging them to contribute equally and setting practical goals amidst each school’s schedule. Twenty-one completed websites were submitted for judging on March 31, 2009.

The judging criteria were based on collaboration, content, presentation and the helping focus, student participation and their effort as a team. The content of the site was judged by the degree of originality and other aspects like information and its appeal to a worldwide audience.

With subjects ranging from wildlife, education, and conservation techniques to cultural comparisons, availability of clean water, pollution, and climate change to music around the world formed the ideas evolved in the contest.

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