Role Play

In our second class of advanced communication skills, we decided to introduce some more fun into the class. We split the class into teams of 5 students each and ask them to enact a scene from everyday life. The students were given a hour to come up with a 5 -10 minute act.

Exactly after an hour we started with the role-plays.Various topics were chosen by different teams.Surprisingly many teams centered their act around social messages. topics varied from property disputes to anti-social elements in society.The winning portrayed the problems faced by 2 Indians in a foreign country.

The students thoroughly enjoyed themselves.Some were natural actors while for many other it was their first acting stint.However the learning from the activity were many.

The students were out of their comfort zone and were still able to perform well. This helped boost their confidence and reduced stage fear.

This was an attempt to provide the students with the opportunity to organize themselves into a working team. The students took the responsibility to come up with the topics for the act, the dialogues, roles, etc.

More importantly it was a great learning with respect to time management.To manage all this in under an hour was indeed a great achievement.

The students learnt the importance of team work, the different situations that they might encounter when working in a team, how to manage dominating people, how to guide a team to success etc.

Overall it was a very pleasurable experience for all of us. We enjoyed ourselves a lot and were glad that this new way of learning to communicate was well appreciated by everyone.

Effective Communication Skills 1

We have just finished a class of Effective communication skills for the students of Katalyst.This was a fun-filled training.The students are in their semester vacation and we felt that the best way to enhance their communication skills was through activities.

On the first day we provided the students with all the required stationery and asked them to come up with a presentation on any topic of their choice.The students were given approximately an hour to plan their activities .We allowed then to form their own groups and plans.The only condition was that every member of the group must speak during the presentation.The raw materials included chart paper, sketch pens and crayons.

We were amazed at the different topics chosen and the creativity exhibited by the students.The topics ranged from recession and its effects to Natural Farming to Call centers.Surprisingly each team presented for atleast 5 minutes and had distributed the responsibilities well.The activity was also a lesson in planning and time management. Many teams planned for nearly 45 minutes and then had to prepare the presentation in the remaining 15 minutes.The activity also exposed the students to team work and its pros and cons.

Judging the presentation was a very difficult task with most presentations being very good.We finally selected a presentation on call centers for its creativity and presentation skills.The feedback for the activity was very encouraging with the students suggesting that it helped them overcome their stage fear and increased confidence in their presentation capabilities.
We are now looking forward to next class of communication skills where we intend to try another new activity.

Dream Job

An article about finding the right job written by Samarth appeared in the Educational supplement of the Deccan Herald on 7th January 2010.The article discusses how to identify the right job and what should students do to find a job of their liking.The complete article can be found in the following link:-
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/45288/land-right-job-keep-it.html

Teaching the teachers

The Adhyapana Team ventured into yet another sphere of education by participating in the Faculty Development Program on Free and Open Source Software held at The Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai from 30th November to 4th December 2009. More than 30 teachers from 20 different engineering colleges participated in the program.
The Adhyapana team handled sessions on Qt programming and GTK+ programming. More details on the course and its contents are available in the following link https://foss.tce.edu/index.php

A peek into the IT industry

An article by Deepak was published in DH Education, the educational supplement of the Deccan herald on 17/10/2009. The article discusses the various job opportunities available in the IT industry and the choices available for fresh engineering graduates. The entire article can be found in the following link.

http://deccanheraldepaper.com/pdf/2009/12/17/20091217a_007100.pdf

Making News

The Adhyapana team will be writing educational articles in the Education section of the Deccan Herald newspaper. The first article written by Shiva appeared on 19th November 2009. Here is a link to the article.

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/36642/prepare-run-race.html

Look out for more such articles in the near future.

June to November

I know its been long since the blog has been updated.There have been a lot of activities that we have been involved in since june. It all started with the followup sessions for the Katalyst students. in the months of August and September. On the students' request we conducted a few classes on aptitude which were followed by tests. The students are preparing for their campus recruitment and needed some practice. We have also been conducting regular C classes for students on Sundays.

In October we conducted the Adhyapana course for the second batch of students at Bangalore.The course was conducted over 3 weekends.The students really enjoyed the training sessions with a number of activities and thought provoking sessions.Again it was fun to work with a diverse set of students with varied requirements. Though the course has been completed, we still need to review the resumes!! A detailed report of the course will soon follow.

Adhyapana has also volunteered to mentor a few Katalyst students.This has been a challenging assignment. It takes a lot of effort and time to get to know the student, her needs and provide proper advice.We hope to do a good job of this as well.

Personally also, these months have been filled with activities ranging from travel to new jobs . We are doing a lot of new activities.In the comping months you will see Adhyapana taking up newer activities and challenges.