The Last One Year

Last week (on the first of December), I was up very early in the morning as I had to finish reviewing some worksheets for Key Stage 3. I was so engrossed in my work that I didn't notice my 9 year old daughter sneak-up behind me. Only, when she put her arms around me and started singing “Happy Birthday to you my dear Baba” that I realized she was there. Apparently, she had been up long before me wrapping my gift that she had made herself. I was feeling pretty exhausted, but her little Happy Birthday song took away all my tiredness. Anyone who has a little princess at home know they are made of something really special.

Now back to my Blog!

The year 2010 is coming to an end in about 3 weeks from today. It has turned out to be quite an eventful year for us since the launch of our website www.Urduathome.com on the 11th of January 2010. It took us about 6 months to get settled down and hone our message for our potential customers. But, after the summer vacations, we started getting a steady stream of members that included a number of schools from UK, Middle East and believe it or not even Pakistan. At present, we have 7 schools in UK who are using our website. (Moseley School, Jack Hunt School, Stretford High School, WakeField City High school, Hodge Hill Girls School, Thomas Decan Academy and Allerton Grange School). A lot more have shown willingness to embrace our website and will be joining soon.

 
What we offer:
 
What we offer is a “LTS” (Language Teaching System) that includes a number of Urdu teaching tools that are build to support and supplement AQA and Edexcel exam board's Urdu assessment plan. Our LTS is flexible and as we are moving forward we are adding more functionality to it. It includes several powerful sections and each one of them consists of number of helpful teaching tools especially designed for Urdu teachers. These tools include interactive/animated (game based) exercises including reading and writing exercises, research activities, puzzles, crosswords, themes, role-playing exercises, sample tests and a lot more stuff. As part of our LTS, we have build an interactive application called E-Shagird that is extremely useful to both Urdu teachers and students. Teachers who are currently using this application are finding it very beneficial.


When we were developing our LTS, we had a choice to create Urdu teaching tools only for the GCSE students, but we made a decision to do it the right way and started from the foundational stage. We knew that Urdu is not taught at the foundational level or even at KS 1 or KS 2 (yet) but we believe in next few years, Urdu will be introduced in earlier stages as well and we want to be prepared for that ahead of time. Numerous research studies have shown that once students cross a certain age limit no amount of good teaching tools will help them develop an interest in a particular language.


Our team spent countless hours preparing a large quantity of interactive/animated lessons as well as a number of worksheets focusing on student's reading and writing skills right from foundational stage. We have also added a large number of GCSE themes based interactive lessons and worksheets in our KS 3 and KS 4 plan that is coming out next month.


Other Products:

Some Urdu teachers might be surprised to know that we have even designed and developed other amazing Urdu teaching tools including 6 different types of colorful bi-lingual Urdu vocabulary Flash Cards with matching Interactive/animated CDs. A number of schools in UK are already using them they might not know it is our product that we have been selling for the past 4 years in different countries through online stores. These are currently available in North America from www.Desistore.com and in UK from http://www.urduresources.com/.


Global yet Local:

We have often been asked a question, “Your company is based in USA, how can you understand the needs of the Urdu teachers or students in UK, Middle East or other geographical locations.” The short answer is, this is the age of globalization and geographic boundaries are the thing of the past. But the long answer is that our team conducted exhaustive research of the AQA and Edexcel exam boards website and learnt about Urdu assessment for GCSE students and sample tests of the past year. We also sought guidance from experienced Urdu teachers teaching GCSE students.


Back Bone of Urdu Language:

It is my hope that after looking at our program many more talented individuals will come forward and develop new and improved tools for teaching Urdu based on modern technology. I have often said, Urdu teachers are the backbone of Urdu and companies like ours has only one job – make sure the backbone is continuously supplied with quality nutrients i.e. High quality Urdu teaching content.


Our History:

We have been developing tools to teach and learn Urdu for over 5 years now and www.Urduathome.com is our third website in the series and the most improved one so far. Our first website was called www.pakxpats.com that offered reading and writing worksheets to Urdu teachers and parents. It was launched in late 2005. Our next website was called www.Urduforkids.com. It was an interactive website with flash based games to teach Urdu to young expatriate children and was launched in 2007.


Building Urdu Societies and Associations:


We are working hard to make Urdu language popular everywhere using our website and Face Book Page “Urdu at Home”. If Urdu becomes more popular in other countries it can create more higher paying Jobs for Urdu teachers which in turn will improve the quality of Urdu teaching. One way to do that is to build networks between Urdu societies in UK, North America, Pakistan, India and other regions. I am in touch with few Urdu societies in USA and can assist in building a strong connection with Urdu societies elsewhere.


Social Responsibility:

Urdu at Home works very closely with “The Citizen's Foundation – USA”. TCF is the biggest non profit in Pakistan that runs over 660 schools mostly for girls in remote areas. My association with TCF-USA goes a few years back and now we have become one of their select few community partners. (http://www.tcfusa.org/urdu-at-home-2)



A look at the future:

Currently, educational institutions in in four different countries are using our teaching tools in their classes. This is just a beginning and we still have along way to go. My long term vision is to have a completely automated system in place which tests different Urdu language skills of individual students and link them with their respective teachers.

We have also setup a separate team to build content for other South Asian languages. With everyone's prayers and well wishes, we will be able to bring them online sometimes middle of next year.



Respects,

Syed Abbas