Live Webcast of Atmiya Parichay

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Dear Parents,

Its time for real action now!

Enjoy the Atmiya Parichay experience sitting back in your drawing room and marvelling at the little wonders of Atmiya Vidya Mandir.

Please click on the following link or copy & paste it in your web browser for live webcast of the event that shall begin from 5:30 PM onwards today, the 26th of December.

mms://119.160.192.171/atmiya_parichay

Kind regards,
IT Support
Atmiya Vidya Mandir

Email service outage

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Dear Parents and Guests,

Due to unforeseen technical problems, our email system was down during the end of last week.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and would humbly request you to please re-send any emails you may have sent during last week.

Kind regards,
IT Support
Atmiya Vidya Mandir

HDFC Spell Bee Competition – India Spells 2010

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To foster the basic but vital skills of students, Atmiya Vidya Mandir had participated in the HDFC standard Life Spell Bee competition – India Spells 2010 held at St. Xaviers School Ahmedabad on 15th Dec 2009. The objective behind the competition was to motivate the children to learn the language, create awareness amongst the children to learn and improve the vocabulary skill in English. Improving vocabulary skill involved improving their spellings, learn concepts, work on their vocabularies, work on their pronunciations, and develop correct English usage that will help them all their lives.
There were two rounds in the competition, the written and the oral round respectively. In the written round, there were 100 questions, of which first 50 where multiple choice. In the first round more than 1000 students from various leading schools had participated. Only 10 out of 1000 participating students qualified for the second round. To filter the students the level of questions was set high. Our students had worked hard with help from teachers but did not qualify for the national level. Nevertheless, they had participated in the true spirit of competition and were determined to work on their short comings.
The following students were selected from our school to compete in the competition.
Sr. No Name Class
1. Ashish Amin VI
2. Sumeet Chaudhary VI
3. Vaishvik Patel VI
4. Anmol Kagrecha VII
5. Nishit Banka VII
6. Sachin Verlekar VII
7. Darsh Bhakta VIII
8. Pranshu Savani VIII
9. Suraj Patel VIII
10. Ghanshyam Dabhi IX
11. Shevin Patel IX
12. Sahishnu Patel IX

Art Mela 2009 – Helping the Child Discover Art

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In order to unearth the potential in every student, Atmiya Vidya Mandir lays a great emphasis on out-of-class activities. Lots of opportunities are provided to the students through MAD (Music, Art and Dance) club, hobbies, and workshops. A three day workshop cum art fair was organized from 26th November to 28th November for the students of class I to class IX, where students were offered training in many artistic discipline:- art and design-drawing, painting and clay modeling. Students were encouraged to showcase their creations, demonstrating their skills.

Experts and artists from PIDILITE, (which is a well known company to build creativity through drawing and painting) were invited to hold a workshop. This three days workshop was coined around the concept of individual development in an atmosphere that is both pleasing and accepted by every child. Students were given hand on experience of mask making, modern art and clay molding which are organized to inspire and instill aesthetic sense.

The various activities like coloring, engraving, paper mache helped students build self esteem as they take pride in the works of art they create. These activities help to develop their problem solving skills, especially when faced with three dimension problems such as sculpting. Moreover, a fifteen days exclusive workshop on pottery making is being conducted for which a special artist is hired and a pottery machine is set up to train the students. Pottery making on the pottery machine help children to improve their sensory awareness and improve their manual dexterity.

Appreciating works of art is as important as encouraging the child to take up art. Regardless of whether a child is a budding artist, or merely likes to look at pictures, this kind of workshop help to get the creative juices flowing. Children, at different ages, are found to appreciate different aspects of art during this workshop.

Gyanodaya 2009

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Quizzes are interesting phenomena! The one who is ‘grilled’ enjoys being ‘grilled’ and at the same time gains knowledge and more importantly – confidence out of the process. Perhaps that’s one of the main reasons why quizzes have gained popularity, especially in the field of education.

One such entertaining, grilling, full of learning opportunities event was organised by the Science and Social Science departments at Atmiya Vidya Mandir. The event, held on the 5th of December 2009, was titled as ‘Gyanodaya 09’ – marking the ascent of knowledge.

The creative teachers had carefully chosen interesting and challenging questions related to both the subjects, with students being the ultimate beneficiary. The event was quite lively and there were many moments like those in the final overs of a 20-20 match! There were two divisions in the event – the Juniors (Std I to IV) and the Seniors (Std V to IX). For each division there were four teams selected with a student from each class of the division. The teams were named after inspiring people who made their mark in the history. Below are the enthusiasts that took part this time around:
Juniors Competition
Aryabhatta: Smit (I), Taarak (II), Nirav (III), Suraj (IV A), Sneh (IV B)
Galileo: Niel (I), Harshil G (II), Kashyap (III), Nimit (IV A), Het (IV B)
Neil Armstrong: Manav (I), Megh (II), Viraj (III), Smit (IV A), Dhanvin (IV B)
Rakesh Sharma: Niramay (I), Param (II), Smit (III), Yathansh (IV A), Pranesh (IV B)

Seniors Competition
Aryabhatta: Jay (V C), Prashant (VI B), Love (VII B), Sagar (VIII A), Parth (IX)
Galileo: Dhwanit (V A), Vaishvik (VI B), Deepak (VII B), Abhishek (VIII A), Purva (IX)
Neil Armstrong: Taran (V B), Sumit (VI A), Anmol (VII A), Vinay (VIII A), Ghanshyam (IX)
Rakesh Sharma: Nikunj (V B), Utkarsh (VI A), Nishit (VII A), Karma (VIII A), Aniruddh (IX)

The quiz had five rounds – General, Mixed Bag (that contained a plethora of questions), Clue, Visual and Rapid Fire.

The participants were full of passion – both for gaining knowledge and for setting higher benchmarks of winning. In the Juniors Competition, quite interestingly, the Aryabhatta and Galileo teams shared the winners’ position. In the Seniors Competition the Neil Armstrong team emerged as the winner while the Aryabhatta team had to be satisfied by the runner’s up position. It was a nail-biting finish in the Seniors’ as both the teams were tied till the last round – the Rapid Fire which proved to be the decider!

The show was impressively handled by the quiz masters, Mr Anand and Ms Samidh who by their humour and presence of mind held the audience captive throughout the event. This event also formally inaugurated the state-of-the-art Auditorium of the School.

Invitation – Atmiya Parichay

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Atmiya Invitation

Atmiya Swajan Shri,

Through a system wherein, values are integrated with education, His Divine Holiness Hariprasad Swamiji Maharaj’s dream of nurturing global citizens equipped with the 21st century skills who would whole-heartedly serve their parents, society and souls, has taken shape at Atmiya Vidya Mandir.

We feel glad and honoured in inviting you to intimately experience the dream manifested. This event will be graced by the presence of His Holiness Hariprasad Swamiji.

ATMIYA PARICHAY
Empowering leaders of tomorrow, today

Time: 5:00 PM onwards

Date: 20th December 2009

Venue: Atmiya Vidya Mandir

After the event, please join us for the dinner with your family and friends. Also, please wear suitable clothing as the event will be celebrated outdoors.

Note for parents: You are kindly requested to meet the children only after the event.

This event will be webcast live, for more information, please log on to Atmiya Parichay or contact us via email on [email protected].

Cordial Invitation from

Sadhu Premswaroop Das, Sadhu Guruprasad Das, P. Vitthaldas Patel

Atmiya Vidya Mandir Family

Parents News Letter – Website updates and Contact Information

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Namaste Parents,

With the New Year approaching, we are sure you have much to look forward to and so do we!

In line with that, we are glad to inform you that we are in the process of upgrading our school website. This will be a phased project and we are shortly bringing in new and exciting interactive features especially keeping in mind the requirements of the parents and the students’ community. Since we will be updating the site, you may face difficulties in accessing the site. Therefore we will be temporarily posting all our updates on another site. You will be able to find all updates related to the school on www.avmfact.blogspot.com.

We sincerely apologize for any missed opportunity to communicate with you in the past and would request you to kindly note the updated contact details. We would like you to continue sending us all your questions, comments, feedback and/or suggestions at the following addresses:

Vitthaldas Patel (P. Fuva): [email protected]
Ashish Tanna: [email protected]

We will try and get back to you promptly.

Thank you for your kind and continuous support.

Atmiya Vidya Mandir

National Spelling Bee Competition

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12 students from the Atmiya Vidya Mandir school will be participating in the national level spelling competition which is called Spell bee competition tomorrow on 15th December 2009 at Ahmedabad.

This will be the second round of the competition where students from different parts of Gujarat will compete to secure a place in the next round which will be held in Mumbai early next year.

Here is the list of the students participating from our school:

AIMS – The Journey Begins

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Let’s face it – Historically, technology has evolved more out of the needs of the business community than those of the education arena. Whereas it’s a subjective issue of prioritizing in this situation, there’s good news that technology creators are now indeed focusing on the requirements of education.Furthermore, we have borrowed technology from the business community to serve our educational needs. There weren’t many such options available in market specifically designed for educational purposes until a few years back. Kudos to the companies who have been putting in efforts to come up with systems and applications to assist the educators. The key however is to look out for a solution that would further help the teachers to remain organized, resourceful and collaborative, some of the most defining qualities of a 21st century teacher.
Jim Collins starts his book “Good to Great” with an interesting statement – “Good is the Enemy of Great.” One can become and remain good enough following the orthodox working methods like using big chunky files to document lesson plans, course materials, test papers and student’s progress reports. All these may become cumbersome to manage within six months time and demand additional resources from the school administration. There are many such things which can be overcome almost effortlessly and effectively with the use of Information Technology, thereby helping teachers to maximize their efficiency and gain 21st century skills.

Some proactive teachers at AVM were on a lookout for such a system and discovered about the opportunities presented by cloud (internet based) computing, especially for educational purpose. Cloud computing is the use of a 3rd party service to perform computing needs over the Internet. The following are the benefits of cloud computing that the schools are certain to want to take advantage of:

  • More Mobility: Teachers can access information wherever they are, rather than having to remain at their desks.
  • Highly Automated: No longer do the teachers need to worry about misplacing a piece of paper with some important information.  

  • Reduced Cost: Teachers’ and administrators’ time saved is actually money saved for the school. Besides, cloud technology is paid incrementally, further saving the school’s money.
  •  Efficient Archiving: Schools can store more data than on private computer systems and retrieve within seconds when needed. 
These benefits and many more encouraged us to hunt for a cloud computing application which we could customize to suit our needs. Google Apps Education Edition came up as a very promising candidate in our endeavor. Apart from Internet based solutions, we considered Moodle and Plone which are very popular intranet based solutions. Whilst exploring those options, we realized they demanded a certain level of technical mindset of the end-user to be used effectively. Besides, Google Apps offered almost everything and more that a
school environment would need from IT. Furthermore, Google Apps was found relatively easier to customize. The Google Apps Education Edition is a broad IT solution that schools can use to bring communication and collaboration tools to the entire academic community for free. Google manages all the technology details, so we can focus our time, energy and budgets on teaching our students.
In other words, it allows us to focus on our bigger aims. Hence we called our customized version of Google Apps as AIMS – Atmiya Vidya Mandir’s Information Management System.

Information sharing is the key to success in today’s world and using Google Apps,our teachers can now collaborate in real-time and access documents, presentations, spreadsheets and sites anytime, from anywhere, on any device. Another fascinating feature of this solution is the instant communication of announcements via free SMS delivery. The Google Apps Calendar tool provides a pretty simple way to communicate instantly thereby saving a lot of time for the teachers. Through AIMS our goal is to achieve excellence in whatever we do here at Atmiya Vidya Mandir. The inherent capabilities of our staff are further enhanced towards excellence which is reflected in our punch line – “Where Technology meets Excellence”.

Hence was born – AIMS – Where Technology meets Excellence. A milestone in our journey towards Excellence.

In AIMS, we have configured the following services for our entire school:

E-mail – Individual email accounts to our faculty with 2 gigabytes of storage per account, search tools to help them find information quickly.
Google Talk – Teachers can call or send instant messages to each other for free — anytime, anywhere in the world. Imagine the possibilities for people collaborating on projects from different locations.

Google Calendar – Teachers can organize their schedules and share events, meetings and entire calendars with others. We can even publish the school calendar on our website to let parents know about events like back-to-school nights, homecoming and vacation days.
Google Docs – Teachers can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and collaborate with each other in real-time right inside a web browser.
Google Sites – We have created a domain wide site shared with everyone at AVM. This site is like a virtual common ground for our people to share and access information. Moreover, we have created around 7000 pages with a well thought of structure to manage teaching resources.

AIMS allows us to have fast and seamless communication which I think is the key to success for any institution. It has become very easy for our teachers to organize their subject meets or make announcements through their personal calendar on AIMS. Generally, change comes with a certain level of resistance. Truth be told, some of our teachers and staff who were not tech savvy earlier and were apprehensive about using computers, are now enjoying working on computers as a result of AIMS.

Here are some feedbacks from teachers:

“From the floor I am on a skyscraper, is my honest feeling after the training session.”

“AIMS has reduced the paper work and it saves lots of time and other formalities of communication. I liked the calendar updates, home page, document uploading facility and the greatest benefit is that we can operate our server login from anywhere in the world.Its wonderful!!!!!!!!!!!”

“This fabulous program has converted our huge campus into a small beautiful home, in which we can communicate with everybody at any time.”

Some of our staff proactively asked for more training sessions to really get to the roots of the system and some had very genuine suggestions to make it even more effective for the school. Some believed this system will be very conducive in further strengthening of the team spirit in the entire staff!

With the launch of AIMS, we have joined the ever expanding yet exclusive league within the academic fraternity who have been happily using Google Apps to make the teaching-learning process more effective.

Of course, this is just the beginning, we will have our lessons to be learnt on the way, but we sure are another step closer towards consistently delivering excellence.

Top ranking CBSE English paper created by an AVM Inspirer !

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C.B.S.E. has started an online forum for teachers. On this forum they allow all the teachers around the world to submit their sample question paper. It is an open site and is intended for the benefit of both the students and teachers. It is a matter of great pride and pleasure for us that our dear Paras Sir had submitted his English sample paper of standard 9th few months ago on this forum. His paper has received a rating of 4 out of 5 and is on the TOP of the list with the highest number of hits 8082 i.e. so far 8082 people have downloaded his paper.

Congratulations Paras Sir for crossing this milestone from the entire AVM (Atmiya Vidya Mandir) team. We wish You Good Luck for all your future endeavors! Paras Sir is a great teacher and a guide, mentor and friend of the students at AVM. We pray to god to help you continue with your excellent work and to keep sharing your experience & expertise with all the teachers.

This is a great achievement for him and hence for the school; so, let us all congratulate him together!

To download Paras Sir’s paper please click on the link below:
http://www.cbseguess.com/papers/sample_papers/ix/2009/english.php

Those who are interested to submit their respective subject sample paper for the year 2010, please follow this link:
http://www.cbseguess.com/papers/sample_papers/

Submitted by: Pranesh Shah