Hi Folks,

Got Zeeksha registered on Twitter and FriendFeed.

We will try and integrate them with the activities on Zeeksha (comments posted by users etc.) so that you will be able to get timely information through these channels.

Would appreciate if you can share your thoughts on how else we can utilze them.

Thanks

-Z Team

Thought it will be interesting to do Zeeksha's own version of "Zeitgeist 2008" (like the Google 2008 list). For a start we just used Page Views as the rationale to determine the list. Agreed that it is not perfect, but it's a start. Also we want to make perfectly clear that this list for all practical purposes is not an indication of anything useful. It's just something that we observed from the analytics data over the last few months.

In general we found the Bangalore audience a lot more engaged in the online world - seeking for information and participating in the discussions a lot more than the audience from the other cities (Granted our audience contributed database of schools is more comprehensive for Bangalore than other cities).

Here's our top 10 viewed schools across cities

1. National Public School (NPS), Indiranagar, Bangalore
2. National Public School (NPS), Koramangala, Bangalore
3. Vidya Sagar Nursery School, Bhoopasandra/Sanjay Nagar, Bangalore
4. Presidency School East, Kasturi Nagar, Bangalore
5. Sishu Griha, New Thippasandra, Bangalore
6. Chirec Public School, Kondapur, Hyderabad
7. Sri Kumaran Children's Home, Bangalore
8. Bharathiya Vidhya Bhavan, Jubliee Hills, Hyderabad
9. Padma Seshadri Bal Bhavan (PSBB), Chennai
10. Shri Shri Ravishankar Vidya Mandir

We will try and dig up some more interesting information and publish it as we go along. If you think something will tickle your interest, please do let us know and we will try to provide the same.

Good luck with the admission folks!!

-Z Team

The 2008 Bangalore Book Festival is here. It is held in the Palace Grounds between November 14th and November 23rd.

It's a good opportunity to get some books at a decent discount/deal. More than anything else, you do get a broad range of sellers (and publishers) over there and hence a good chance to get some decent titles.

If any of your dropped by there, do write a few words to share your experiences here.

-Z team

I am a big fan of Paul Krugman (whose columns are syndicated by various news papers in India). Of course you know that he was awared the Nobel prize for economics recently. In one of his recent posts ("A bit of autobiography"), he referred to an earlier version of his "autobiography".

Amongst other things, this section got my attention which may be of interest to the folks who visit Zeeksha. Here's the excerpt.....

• "I have a self-serving theory: interesting ideas have very little to do with interesting life experiences. According to this theory a person who has grown up in eight countries and speaks five languages, who has taken a dogsled across Siberia and a raft down the Amazon, is no more likely to have a deep insight into social science than someone who grew up in a safe middle-class suburb reading science-fiction novels.
• I hope this theory is true, because I have an utterly conventional background. I was born in 1953, at the peak of the baby boom. I grew up in the New York suburbs, had an ordinary education (I attended one of the many John F. Kennedy High Schools), and went on to four uneventful college years"

I know that we, parents, put in a lot of effort to provide the "right background" to our kids and (Count me in there!!) and would like to find the "right curriculum" that provides the "balance" of academic and extra-curricular (and/or other) activtiies. Obviously, this is with the intent of developing a well rounded individuals.

While some school's claim to fame is the focus on academics (meaning rigor), some others focus on "well rounded curriculum". I'm sure both schools of thought are thriving. (Well - look at the fees of some of the elite pre-schools and the international schools).

What are your thoughts? Do you feel that the right "school" makes a lot of difference. Or is it something else that matters?

Would love to hear your thoughts on this here. Thanks.

The admission season for getting your kids admitted to schools in 2009 is about to begin (in fact it seems to have already begun in some schools). You, the eager parent, is likely have begun the ground work towards this direction by talking to and/or visiting various schools.

During the process, you would be collecting valuable information (about the school, admission process, when application forms are being handed out, procedure, dates, do, don'ts, experience of interacting with the school etc.). If you think it will be helpful others (including the school), we will greatly appreciate if you can share such information.

We at Zeeksha are trying to gather some information and put it up here to benefit the community. We are also in the process of trying to share this information in a structured fashion to the community. (Currently - they are shared in the school's information page as updates).

Till then - feel free to share information or tips through the comments / reviews section of the various schools. If you have any suggestions on how we should be doing this, please feel free to share it with us at feedback@zeeksha.com.

Thanks and hoping this will be useful for you all and looking forward to hearing from you.

-Zeeksha Team

Hi Folks,

We recently launched a "Questions & Answers" section on Zeeksha to enable the users to ask open ended questions and solicit the input of the community. Over a period of time, we want to make the q&a available under a school too (so that all the information is available in one place). But, for now - it is a general purpose q&a module so as to get some of your questions answered by the community. Hope you find this functionality useful.

We would greatly appreciate any feedback that you would like to provide about Zeeksha and would love to hear from you on what you would like to see happen.

Happy hunting.

-Zeeksha Team

It started with us trying to get our kids admitted to school. Though we were resonably clear on the (possible) schools that we wanted to try and admit our kids, we wanted to get some background information about them in order to better educate ourselves of these (schools).

Quite surprisingly, we could not find any decent information out there - more importantly - information from the "user community".

Not so surprisingly, there were others who were looking for similar information. Hence a few of us got together and decided to launch Zeeksha - a place where you can get information about schools and share your thoughts and experiences in order to help others.

Users have the ability to add schools (if they are not listed) and are also encouraged to share their thoughts and experiences about the schools. We would ideally like "frist hand" information - 'coz that is the most reliable and useful information.

Hoping that zeeksha will be useful to parents out there who are seeking for good information.

We would also greatly appreciate any inputs / feedback that you can share in order to make this successful.

-

Zeeksha Team