“In how many ways is your child intelligent…….Understanding the multiple intelligences of your child.”

As a part of the ongoing ‘Learning Series’ Indus World School Ludhiana organized a workshop titled “In how many ways is your child intelligent…….Understanding the multiple intelligences of your child.” Mr R Sreenivasan conducted this session. Mr. Sreenivasan is one of the most sought after consultants for leading newspapers like The Times of India, Hindustan Times and The Indian Express on caree

rs, having contributed regular columns and key speaker in seminars. His motivational talks have inspired a large number of students and he continues to be in demand by the school community - schools, teachers and students. Shreeni, also a corporate trainer has been a facilitator for CRESTCOM, Denver, US-based, largest executive training corporate in the world with presence in over 55 countries. 

Entirely interactive, the session was an eye-opener for the parents who tend to impose their own preferences upon their children based on their own ‘programming’. Sreeni narrated several stories and anecdotes to make his point. It was an enthralling session with Sreeni talking about various static behaviours parents show while dealing with their children. He emphasized the point that children do as they see their parents do. Learning happens through experience & it is very important to ‘bring’ the ‘outside world’ into the classrooms. And this is what education at Indus is all about. Children create their knowledge through experiences.

Howard Gardener’s theory on Multiple Intelligence was decoded and presented in a very interesting and easy to comprehend style. There were a lot of hands-on activities that helped the parents to understand and spot the intelligences that their children possess. Individual action exercises, open house discussion, thinking exercises followed by group sharing were some of the activities where the parents were actively engaged in understanding each of the intelligences - inter-personal, intra-personal, kinesthetic, naturalistic, linguistic, musical and spatial. 

The parents found the session very interesting and insightful. The workshop ignited in them a desire to create an environment to enliven their own lives and pass it on to their children. They also got a deep insight into the activities that could be done to nurture and hone the talents and intelligences in children. The session also helped parents to be aware of the career choices that would be suitable for their children.

Mr Sujit Bhattacharya, CEO Indus World Schools, shares his views on effective use of Information Technology in school pedagogy

In the past few years there has been a huge amount of attention from  government and schools on the concept of smart classrooms. The heady mix of media rich content and computing power is supposed to make our children able to learn better. Many schools have spent humongous amounts of money in buying sophisticated hardware and software to make our classes smarter. The moot question is if this is really making our children smarter?

Seymour Papert, the father of Artificial Programming and an undisputed thought leader in the domain of education, psychology and computing, has made some interesting observations on this topic. In typical situations of IT usage in

classrooms we let computers to put our children through various exercises at different difficulty levels. Computers are also programmed to dispense of a lot of information from a vast database.  In a certain way, computers are programming the child's learning.

Papert believes that the real learning from technology comes when the child programs the computer and not the other way around.
When a child learns to control a computer, the child is actually teaching the computer to think. And in the attempt to do so, the child explores about how he thinks, and essentially starts to learn to think about thinking. This process (also called epistemology) is actually a very sophisticated evolution of the child's ability to acquire knowledge and build new mental models and structures for creating new learning. Evidently this process can be enabled at an early age with children with the help of technology.

A simple way to do this is by exposing children to early age programming. Nowadays there are many free software which can be installed and explored by parents and teachers who have no formal knowledge of programming at all. One of the ways working with computers enables intellectual development,  is by advancing the progression from concrete thinking, which begins at age 6,  to formal thinking processes which develops at age 12. In schools where visual programming is introduced by age 7 or 8, we often observe children  manipulating repetitive commands while trying to make a simple game involving shapes and colour combinations. Thus, combinatorial thinking (nested loops in programming parlance), which is a formal process of thinking can be advanced much earlier than otherwise possible. This can have a significant effect on the trajectory of intellectual development of the child. Some of the simple benefits of exploring computer programming is on mathematical concepts. The concretization of  numbers concepts, understanding of  negative number spaces,  two dimension and three dimensional algebra,  geometrical shapes, distances and angles etc all become less abstract when evolved through a exciting problem solving approach by a child.

The computer culture has already given us very useful vocabulary like input, output and feedback.  For example, the concept of the 'bug' allows the child to understand that 'debugging' is a simple repeated process of error rectification, something natural and free of guilt or shame. Thus culture contributes in helping the children move to a higher level of thinking and understanding, even at an emotional level. 

 

Parents and teachers today must try and expose their children to early experiences in programming. This will require us to break traditional curriculum and explore the usage of new age visual programming techniques such as Scratch (developed in MIT) and also fabulous products like LOGO (also MIT) which actually got the entire revolution  started in the eighties.  Technology and curriculum  choice of schools can surely make a substantial difference in the way children reflect and analyze, which is the real path to smartness, and the not the dumb consumption of multimedia entertainment in the garb of technology.. 

Design For Change- School Challenge-2012 Launch in Aurangabad (25th Aug)

25^th August’2012 shall be written in letters of gold in the history of the IWS, Aurangabad, with the launch of DFC hosted at its threshold.

Indus World School, Aurangabad  launched Design For Change School Challenge-2012  in the city at a packed programme at Aurangabad Gymkhana on 25^th June 2012. Mr Rahul Bose, noted actor and social activist, and Mr. Madhav Chavan (Founder/ CEO Pratham Initiative were present for this event. Principals and students from over 30 schools in Aurangabad were also present for this event. Prior to the launch, Indusian from Grade V to Grade VIII drive a rally on “ Regulating Traffic” in the City. Indusian covered 3.5 km rally starting from API corner, CIDCO signal, N1 chowk and Cannought garden. A Documentary film on the rally was run during the Launch Ceremony.

On 25^th morning High Energy level, Positivity, Happiness and the echoes of I CAN reverberated across the walls of the school. Each and every Indusian’s spirit touched the skies with the interaction with the youth icon of Bollywood, Rahul Bose. His charismatic approach immediately got him in deep connect with the Indusians. While the young ones were excited with the release of gas balloons by the star, the older ones were thrilled with a game of football with him. Traditionally welcomed by the Mentors of Indus World School, Rahul spent considerable time interacting with the students, stressing the importance of academic orientation and its relevance. Rahul admired and appreciated the Agriculture Centre, the Art Gallery and the Centre for Peace at the Indus World School Campus.

The visit of Rahul Bose, Brand Ambassador for Design for Change, to the School has left an everlasting impression on the young impressionable minds of the Indusians at Aurangabad. Later, in the DFC launch event stories of change were shared. The audience was glued to their seats to see the change the children can bring in the society for betterment. The event was followed by the press conference where the renowned reporters of the city covered the event.