Indian School Wadi Kabir

Infobox School
name = Indian School Al Wadi Al Kabir
motto = Darkness to Light
established = 1939
type = Co-educational
affiliation = Central Board of Secondary Education, India
district = Al Wadi Al Kabir
grades = Kindergarten to Grade 12
principal = P N Ashok
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colors = Grey and White
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location = Muscat, Oman
country =
information =
website = http://www.iswkoman.comThe Indian School Al Wadi Al Kabir (ISWK), established in 1939, is located in the city of Muscat, Oman. The school was founded by an Indian born Omani businessman Khimji Ramdas. Mr. Leo Lobo was principal of the school since 1990 to Spring 2008. The present principal is Mr. P N Ashok.

History and Background

The school was established in 1939 and welcomed its first set of students on the 2nd, July of the same year. After fifty years of steady progress, the school celebrated its Golden jubilee on the 1st November 1991. Though originally a Gujarati medium school, the school began to feel a growing pressure and demand to convert the medium of instruction to English so as to meet the challenges of the modern era. The management in June 1987 effected this change.The years have flown by since and the standard set by the school has seen the student strength grow very positively each year. Prior to 1993 it was situated at different locations and the growing demand for admission began to strain its existing facilities.It was therefore, decided to shift the entire school to a larger and well designed building that would offer better facilities in terms of a large playground, spacious classrooms, laboratories, a hall and adequate administrative space.

In 1992 it was also decided to upgrade it to secondary level. An application for a composite affiliation was made in the academic year 1992-93. The rented premises of the school and its future plans for a state of the art school building were inspected in November 1992 and the school was granted composite affiliation till Grade X for 1993 (vide C.B.S.E. letter reference number CBSE/Aff/91/61304, dated 22-12-1992). The first batch of Class X students appeared at the AISS Examination of the C.B.S.E. in March 1996. It was upgraded to Senior Secondary School in 1999 and the first batch of Class XII students appeared at the Board examination in 2001.

The current school building was constructed in 1992-93 and occupied in the beginning of the following academic year. As it is located in an area called Al Wadi Al Kabir, Indian School Muttrah as it was called from 1987, was renamed Indian School Al Wadi Al Kabir as per the instructions of the Directorate of the Ministry of Education. This building, apart from having spacious, airy and sunlit classrooms, also has all the facilities that are required of a good school, like separate science laboratories, IT laboratories, a library, an art room, a music room, an audio-visual room, a multipurpose hall with facilities for indoor games, and adequate space for some outdoor games.

By the time the school moved to the new premises in Wadi Kabir, the number on roll had increased and an afternoon shift was introduced on the same premises. However, because the two-shift system was very inconvenient to parents and students, it was abolished and pre-primary and some of the primary classes were shifted to rented premises. At the same time plans were being prepared for a new state-of-the-art building in Wadi Kabir, which was ready in July 2000. It currently houses Classes I to IV. Gradually, Class V will be shifted to this building. Pre-primary classes had already been housed in premises very close to this building in 1997.

Academics

ISWK is a private, co-educational day school that is under the Central Board of Secondary Education of India. The school offers complete educational services starting from Kindergarten through to 12th grade senior school and follows the CBSE syllabus, which is regarded world wide as one of the toughest syllabi in the world.

In the last two years, 11th and 12th, students can choose from two streams of specializations, Commerce and Science, and the subjects include accounting, business studies, mathematics, economics, history, physical and health education, art education, computer science, biology, physics and chemistry. The school also offers foreign languages such as French and Arabic.

Faculty

The best asset of the school are its teachers; they form its backbone. All the teachers of the School are well qualified. To keep them abreast with developments in the field of education, frequent in-house workshops are conducted. Apart from these, in-service workshops by experts in different subjects are also periodically conducted. Some of these that have been held in the past few years were in Hindi, Mathematics and Social Studies at the Middle and the Secondary level, in Mathematics and Environmental Studies for Primary teachers and on Activity based approach for Kindergarten. Objective-based teaching and evaluation, Value Education in classroom are a few other topics. These staff developmental activities have enabled us to re-organize teaching to make it activity oriented, project and application-based, with emphasis on the acquisition of the skills of self-learning by children. Methods of evaluation have also undergone a change in keeping with the current teaching-learning approach.

Alumni

The school's alumni hold positions in some of the world's most prestigious firms, including Google, Infosys, Wipro, TCS and Microsoft.

One of the most notable alumni of the school is Sarah Jane Dias who was Miss India 2007.

External links

* [http://www.iswkoman.com/htm/about_us/about.shtml Indian School Al Wadi Al Kabir]