Creating your school home page
G. MAHADEVAN
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Now your school too can have a presence on the world wide web!
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Photo: K.K. Mustafah.
On the info highway: Education and more.
A few months ago when Nandita and Saraswathy, Std II students, sat down to create a painting at a multimedia training camp organised by the education department, little did they know that their talent would become the showpiece of a new programme of e-togetherness that was being put together by the IT@School programme.
This painting is what greets those who stop by the homepage of ‘school wiki’: a Wikipedia for schools designed to introduced children to ideas of collaborative learning. School wiki would be in Malayalam and can be accessed at ‘ www.schoolwiki.in.’
Varied fare
Once they register themselves on this site, each school can upload anything from the history of their school, the importance of that locality, details of various facilities available at the school, achievements of students and alumni to an unlimited number of photographs and videos.
As soon as they learnt of this programme through the media, students of the Irumbana high school and the HIHS Edavanakkad in Kozhikode district have prepared an armload of interesting facts and figures about their schools and about the places where the schools are located. The whizkids at the Irumbana school are banking on their expertise in creating a blog for their school to make a splash in the school wiki.
As School Wiki matures, the IT@School expects students to start posting learning resources including the findings of school projects. Teachers, the alumni and the public at large are expected to use school wiki as a repository of resources. Bits of useful information they chance upon in an e-book, shortcuts to solve mathematical problems, dos and don’ts about experiments in chemistry. Each subject would have a ‘corner’ where all this information can be deposited.
School wiki would give special focus on generating a body of knowledge relating to the study of Malayalam. Students of Std VIII, IX and X would be encouraged to take up projects such as ‘Pradeshika pathram’, ‘Nadodi Vignana Kosham’ and ‘Ente Naadu’ under the guidance of Malayalam language teachers.
As with the Wikipedia, school wiki can be freely edited and updated by anyone. However, hawk-eyes at the IT@School would be keeping a close watch on this portal to ensure that nothing objectionable gets into school wiki.
All IT coordinators in schools would be given special training this month so that all data inputs are over by December and the school wiki is ready for launch on January 1, 2010. By January 26, the IT@School would also launch websites—in English and in Malayalam—for all government schools in the State.
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