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My own web world
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It's never too early to stake out your very own corner on the Internet - and many school kids, encouraged by some educational websites, are doing just that.
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TEN-YEAR-old Sruthi Pai, a Class V student of Adarsha Vidyalaya, run by Bhavan's Vidya Mandir in Kochi, was on the front pages of Malayalam language newspapers recently: she has designed her own web page ( www. sruthipai.net) and uses it to introduce her family, provide brief accounts of her holidays and hobbies, and to share her jokes and stories with other youngsters.
From Chennai's Hindu Senior Secondary School, 14-year-old Vinay Mohan, decided to share with the world every thing that he has gathered on his two main interests: guns and planes. You can view his collection of pictures and text at www.geocities.com/vm_snake.
For Sruthi Samraj, Nithya Kartha and Shefali Karve of Baldwin Girls' High School, Bangalore, their own website took them all the way to Mumbai - for the finals of the national SchoolNet Websites Contest organised by that excellent educational web resource for students, teachers and parents: www.schoolnetindia.com. They competed with students from Pune, Delhi and Calcutta -- and finally the Delhi kids from Sanskriti School came out over all winners - but everyone nevertheless had a great time (and some great prizes), even as they took that first important step towards creating their own little 'web ulagam'.
The SchoolNet contest, saw teams of four from 600 schools nationwide, all students in the age group 11 to 18 ( classes VII to XII) vie for a coveted three week trip to Canada. This correspondent had a chance to see many of the entries - the website about their school had to be completed in two hours -and the results were truly awesome! Seeing what their students could do, quite a few schools were persuaded to use these talents to set up permanent websites.
Indeed, students these days have unprecedented opportunities to learn by doing when it comes to web authoring. Many Internet Service Providers including the market leader VSNL, provide free space for customers to create their own web pages. And the actual task of putting together attractive sites has been made simple by popular web creation tools like Microsoft's `Frontpage', which is seemingly designed for dummies, that's you and me! In next to no time, you can save chunks of text as hypertext documents, add pictures, links, even some basic animation.
On a slightly different tack, the US-based service organisation, Schools Online ( www.schoolsonline.org) has been supporting over 40 schools in Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Kolkata to create their own Internet Learning Centres (ILCs). Schools Online supports the schools during the first year, then encourages them to turn the ILCs into self supporting cybercafes or training institutes.
In Bangalore, the organisation has funded 11 underprivileged schools this year. Slowly but surely, the school scene is changing; many state governments, even central agencies like CBSE and ISCE have recognised that a knowledge of computers is best acquired in the school years. And knowing how to exploit the Internet in a responsible manner for self-fulfilment is a key lesson that kids are learning in a painless, pleasurable way that is the envy of their parents!
A.Vishnu
vishnua@hotmail.com
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