AYV Workshop

A workshop on Adobe Youth Voice was organized in Govt. Secondary Training School for Women, Berhampur on 18/08/12. The training session covered the theoretical as well as practical aspects of "Documentary Movie Making". The focus was on camera handling and making stop motion animation. The selected teachers showed enthusiasm during the training process and prepared a stop motion animation. The stop motion animation highlighted the necessity of taking precautionary measures while lighting crackers.

Resource Group Meeting

Resource group meetings were held recently in all the three zones. The selected teachers who have demonstrated effective use of technology in teaching learning, were invited to attend the workshops. These workshops catered to the technical needs of the star performers as far as technology integration in teaching learning is concerned. These workshops were taken through extensive discussions on effective implementation of the DE program at school level, in which both the teachers and the monitoring experts participated there by taking steps in identifying hard spots, which formed the basis for designing teaching aids with an innovative approach as part of these workshops. The central zone workshops, was held in Kendrapada and Cuttack Dist respectively, where in a hardware training was organized as part of these workshops. This training basically focused on identifying minor hardware problems and rectifying them at the school level - thereby preventing delays as far as repair and maintenance is concerned. There was a focus on the preventive measures such as scanning of virus, defragmenting hard disk, registry cleaning etc.

What makes a Leader

Recently a three day workshop was organized in the state office on "what makes a leader." The basic proposition on which the entire discussion hinged was "are leaders born or made." "What distinguishes great leaders from merely good ones." In conducting this three day hands on workshop which involved a number of evaluative exercises, focusing on increasing one's level of self-awareness and understanding one's emotions, I focused on the "Covey time management matrix," "the 360 degree evaluation based on the seven emotional intelligence indicators" and the "Jungian personality types." 

It was a very interesting experience for me in trying out the 360 degree evaluation on the EI indicators (emotional intelligence)  and I do sincerely feel that I tried my best to make my team members peel apart the hardened layers of social conditioning in trying to understand their own emotional make-up and thereby how they act and react to different events and circumstances in their day to day life - understanding one's emotions, strengths and weakness, needs and drives and their effect on others. It was a lot easier for the team members than under normal circumstances as they have worked together for a sufficiently long period of time. The workshop also focused on the physiology of the brain - especially mirror neurons, spindle cells and oscillators and how they determine one's actions and reactions. Great leaders are those whose behavior powerfully leverages the system of brain inter-connectedness. The main point I wanted to drive in was that "emotional leadership isn't just putting on a game face every day. It means understanding your impact on others - then adjusting your style accordingly."

The "Jungian dichotomy" was used in evaluating one's personality type while the "Covey Matrix" revealed how effectively we spend our time in the course of a day - especially by realizing in which quadrant we are - true emergencies, personal pro-activity and power, fire fighting and waste.

Subrat Sarkar, Operations Director,
American India Foundations Trust.