The New School Web Portal

[posted in the school magazine - Signature ]

The new school web portal was launched October 26th of 2010, a culmination of about 10 months worth of joint collaboration between the school management team and the AAG core team. The brain child for this initiative came from a very active 1986 alumni batch. The launching of the web portal was amongst several of the ideas which were discussed in the batch’s forum and the idea presented formally to the school management team by AAG who subsequently blessed the initiative. What followed after that was a series of meetings, hundreds of emails, lot of running around to make things happen culminating in the first cut of gulmohurschool.org. Today the site stands on a solid infrastructure and the goal over time is to grow it as the school grows…. onwards forever onwards. The portal today is built on moodle, a learning management system (LMS) and joomla, a content management system (CMS). Other than that the portal has links to social media sites like face book, Picasa, orkut and BlogSpot.

The first cut was an interesting journey and the journey was not all smooth, hundreds of hours that both AAG and the school management spent included amongst other things the challenges around getting funding for the initiative, reaching out to GHS Alumni, talking to Bank officials, registering AAG as a not for profit, buying a hosting server, buying domain name, design and developmental work on the site, mail accounts, getting content, photographs from the school and alumni, writing up content.

So what is the vision that went behind the school portal? The internet has pretty much changed our lives in the last 10-15 years and is continuing to change our lives. What the technology has done is basically made our life easier by making information available, communication easier, encouraging collaboration etc. Along the same theme the vision for the school portal is to achieve more or less the same goals. Make information available to students, prospective students, parents, teachers and alums – some of this is already achieved – today you can go to the portal and learn about the school, criteria for admission, activities at the school, faculty names, school toppers, best sportsperson, provide feedback, testimonials etc .

The moodle is another piece that can be a powerful tool for teaching as it is basically an LMS so teachers can teach online courses both to supplement face to face courses or purely online so students can take part irrespective of their location. Online discussions, quizzes, tests in addition can supplement student education.
Some of the other ideas which are being discussed pending approval is online career counseling and mentoring of students, content about school clubs, club activities and collaboration opportunities there, taking the school magazine online which could be a more cost effective model than the current model, allow for online collaboration between parents and teachers to monitor student progress, sms facility to collaborate with parents and school newsletter.

By now I am sure you are as excited about the portal as much as we were building it. I encourage you to visit and tell your friends to visit it too. We also would encourage you to provide your feedback.

Thank you.

Tanmoy Bhadra
Alumni 1986 Batch
(On behalf of the AAG team)