Friday, September 2, 2011

HOW WE USE TECHNOLOGY- SAVING PAPER OR WASTING PAPER!!

Navodayas have abundant examples, if we care to look for, of how technology has resulted in more wastage. Due to lack of understanding of modern processes and procedures, Navodayas establish such practices which result in wastage. A classic case is how e-mail is utilized in our system. Before we adapted to  e-mails, we used to receive cyclostiled communications on recycled paper. In a way it was greener. Now a days many regional offices, with an exception of one or two, send e-mails which the schools would promptly download and print. The story should end there in ideal conditions. But we are different and our administrators are even more different!! Vidyalayas would receive the same communications in snail mail too in a week or two. We can't be certain that the same happens to the communications ROs receive from Vidyalayas. But odds are in favour of that probability.

If a Principal claims that they have no internet  access nothing more would be dishonest than that, as we are aware that almost all of India is covered by at least 2G connectivity if not 3G. GPRS and EDGE are enough for e-mail communications. Even printing of e-mails can be avoided by taking a soft backup of such e-mails either day wise or topic wise. If you are worried about the safety of the documents, take the back up in more than one place!! Of course our mail boxes already leave no scope for such kind of data loss and back up is no longer inevitable.Back up may be justified from the point of view of immediate access and organization of data for easy access.

Why Can't We Have Wi-Fi Hotspots In Our Campuses?

In half of the schools,communications within the school can be electronic as they are well located. As our campuses are not huge, we can create our own vidyalaya WI-Fi networks. Sounding far fetched then read this. How much of brand image we can cultivate if we can boast of a couple of hundred Wi-Fi hotspots!

Hope somebody is there listening!