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Home What's New Profiles Activities Announcements Publications Articles Resources WWW Learning Network Learning Network Group Profiles	Olcott Memorial High School Keywords High School, Urban Poor, Computers, English, Language Geographical Location Chennai, Tamilnadu Languages Tamil & English Objective/Mission/Goals Olcott Memorial High School is an integral part of the Olcott Education Society (OES), which is a charitable Trust run by the Theosophical Society (TS). Colonel Henry Steele Olcott, of the Theosophical Society, started the school in 1894, with the vision of bringing about social change through the education of the underprivileged. The school is completely free for the students-no charges are collected for any activity of the school. The school is striving hard to give quality education, through a very good library, primary resource room, an Audio- Visual room, games and sports (the campus is about 9 acres), besides giving scope for developing livelihood skills through a Craft section. Work Description The school uses many Audio-Visual tools and techniques in its teachings. Use of these techniques finds that students retain to a greater extent and are also able to express better. More than 80% of the teachers are computer literate and comfortable with the use of and creating material for TAL (Technology Aided Learning). With 70% of the teachers using technology to help in teaching and the remaining 30% learning the skills, Olcott has the required teacher quality to run a full-fledged computer lab now, in Tamil, (the medium of instruction) and progressively help children to move to use of English. The Olcott School Focus on Language Learning - English and Tamil with an objective that the children at the end of ten years of school should be able to use Tamil and English well. Teaching English to the Disadvantaged-TED, a program with support from The British Council was started in the school in 1995. The program is based on "From Meaningfulness to Meaning". Highlights of the program include Content selection based on student needs School- teacher driven program with expert support for improvement Constantly improving methods- planning, implementing, discussion, feedback Multi faceted approach- not just one method Works towards getting the students to the formal State curriculum Learning is fostered through activities around daily livelihood and lifestyles and also aids the children in learning about health, hygiene, and nutrition. Alphabets and phonics are taught only after the children are familiar with the spoken language. Interactive English Learning material in the form of CD-ROMs is available and at present used by some motivated students of senior classes and teachers to try out the effectiveness. Since the children can speak the mother tongue, Tamil, approaches in Tamil learning include providing graded reading material and meaningful reading experiences. Audio room experiences support standard pronunciation that many of the students find difficult to learn. Contact Information Lakshmi Suryanarayanan, Headmistress Olcott Memorial High School 28, Besant Avenue Besant Nagar Chennai, Tamilnadu 600090 Phone: (044) 2491 5826 (o), 2491 8093 (r) 2490 1019 (r)
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