Harried about school admissions? Just log on to www.zeeksha.com
Every year year, a multitude of parents, among them NRIs who relocate to India, start the stressful exercise to get their kids admitted to a good school. Most of them are a harried lot too as reliable details related to the basis of admission, school fees, faculty, are not easy to find. These hard-to-find details are much sought after by parents to work out a ‘winning’ strategy to beat the system which might turn away their kids, often with apparently no clear reason. These despondent parents can now find succour by seeking advice and suggestions at Zeeksha.com.
This online endeavour, to share the agony and ecstasy of school admission experiences, is the brainchild of Ms Chitra Iyer, an NRI who along with her husband relocated to Bangalore in 2006. Not finding much online info related to schools Chitra went about gathering info and started posting in her blog.
Soon, it became a forum for parents to discuss about schools, their concerns related to issues, admission dates, and more.
This lead to the hosting of zeeksha.com, a better way for parents/guardians to look up and discuss school info and get answers to questions, like these - ‘Can any one tell me on what basis Kormangala NPS selects children’, ‘Will there be any interview for nursery, my daughter will turn 3 in July 2009’ or ‘We are currently living in the US and plan to relocate to India next year. We would like to get our daughter admitted in the 5th grade (hopefully) in NPS’, or ‘Anybody knows how is vibgyor high Pune’.
“The reason to start a site especially to discuss, review schools was while there are sites that have databases and ways to write reviews, there is nothing to distinguish a school from a toaster oven,” says Chitra. “Through Zeeksha we want to provide a forum specifically intended to enable parents to exchange information and share their experiences about schools. It is so much more helpful hearing from other parents than from the school websites.
The idea is to enable parents to communicate their own experiences so that those seeking for information will get to see the same from different perspectives.”
To get a feel of the Zeeksha community, parents may like to check out the discussion on National Public School, at Koramangala or, go through some detailed reviews and experiences, shared by parents, or follow the thread in the Active Discussion section in which different points of view on interviews and admissions are posted. Parents can also browse the Q & A section which has answers to quick queries on syllabus, fee structure.
Launched in Sept 2008, Zeeksha.com receives around 1500 hits a day. It presently covers the cities of Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, and Hyderabad. Zeeksha.com, and has plans to spread its wings to add more cities, soon.
