NIE completes an eventful year

KOLKATA: Over 3,000 students from 150 member schools will converge at Science City on Wednesday evening to celebrate the birthday of Newspaperin-Education (NIE) movement launched by The Times of India in August 2002.
With the motto – learning through fun, learning for life – the NIE team has made a mark in most city schools within a year.
A concert by pop star Palash Sen of the celebrated rock band Euphoria will mark the grand occasion.Entry passes for the birthday bash, sponsored by Centurion Bank, will be distributed from the TOI office to members on a first-come-first-served basis on Monday and Tuesday. This programme is co-sponsored by Lipton.
Apart from organising workshops for students, teachers and parents on a variety of subjects on a regular basis, NIE also played host to the city''s first ever Children''s Film Festival twice last year.
Through interactive sessions and workshops with eminent personalities including Amartya Sen, Kiran Karnik, Bikram Ghosh, Vishwanathan Anand and Viren J. Shah, NIE has always aimed at exposing students to varied fields.
"NIE has played an important role in integrating the students with the society, especially through the print media last year. For example, an article on plastic pollution in the newspaper can be referred to in a chapter on environment and this way a student correlates to the subject better," said Apeejay School principal Rita Chatterjee.
Two major initiatives -- Newspaperin-action and Beyond-books-approach -- aimed at integrating students to a broad based education system, will be launched by NIE in the forthcoming year.
"The banks have come to play a significant role in education as a result of globalisation. Not only are they tying up with various institutions and universities for facilitating a child''s education, they are keen on developing a long-term relationship with such institutions," said Centurion Bank regional head Jayanta Gupta. Over 20,000 student members are looking forward to the event.
"The best thing about the movement is that they make the whole learning process fun for us. We are exposed to a wide variety of subjects and are free to express our views and opinions in the weekly Champ," said Kapil Das, class XI student of St James, excited about the evening with Euphoria.