Nari Jibon established and has been maintaining two blogs ( English and Bengali) since 2007 in order to increase creativity and the writing skills of the staff and students. After a few months of having started our blogging activities, we got a Rising Voices mini-grant that has been helping a lot to improve its activities. We could let the community people know through our students and their guardians about the importance of blogging. Since we started our blogging activities more than three hundred students/guardians got to know about blogging though they all did not do blogging actively but we got some of them who blogged and as yet blogging. Our trainer Taslima Akter invited to attend a blogging workshop arranged by Relief International Bangladesh as a blog trainer. She trained more than 25 people on blogging following Citizen Media guide.
We arranged several blogging workshops for the staff and students. We also have been maintaining a weekly training program on photo/video blogging etc. In our workshop we got Mr. Razib Ahmed a renowned professional blogger, Mr. Shawn Ahmed from Uncultured project, Ms. Kira Kariakar a Venezuelan photo blogger and journalist. We learned many things from them about blogging, photo, video blogging, and about Flickr etc. We also got Citizen Media guide from rising voices that helped us a lot to improve our blogging activities. We are following Citizen Media guide. Our trainer is following the guide to train up our students/bloggers regularly. In these ways our current students are learning about blogging, increasing their creativity and writing skills And also our upcoming students will be learning about blogging as blogging is integrated to the entire course curriculum. Now six of our staffs and 12 students have separate blogs.
Student blogs:
1. Afrin's Gallery http://asiaafrin.blogspot.com/
2. Jesmin’s garden http://jesmingarden.blogspot.com/
3. Zannat's world http://zannatworld.blogspot.com/
4. Rainbow http://jannat-fardoush.blogspot.com/
5. Bangladeshi Women http://jainub-khanam.blogspot.com/
6. Ahona http://ahona-hira.blogspot.com/
7. Window of Mind, http://sufia-eti.blogspot.com/
8. My Dream, http://poly-dream.blogspot.com/
9. Choti’s blog http://choitrerdinguli.blogspot.com/
10. Every child is special by Afiya Akter http://afia-akter.blogspot.com
11. My World by Rumi Akter http://rumi-akter.blogspot.com
12. Cloudy sky by Rifat Akter http://rifat-akter.blogspot.com
Staff blog addresses:
1. Bipa’s Prokrito Bangladesh http://www.bipa-prokritobangladesh.blogspot.com/
2. Sujan’s Chinta, http://hi-bangladesh.blogspot.com/
3. Creative talk by Nilufa http://annekuet.blogspot.com/
4. Rafiq’s eye, http://kazi-rafiq.blogspot.com/
5. Techna Tara: http://taslima-toma.blogspot.com/
6. kajol's Destiny by Afroza Akter Kajol http://kajols-destiny.blogspot.com
Most of them are writing in their blogs regularly. We hope the number will increase and we will get more active bloggers in near future who will open their separate blogs. We also hope that through blogging they will be able to improve themselves and to convey their thoughts to improve and or solve the problems of the society/ nation.
We also are planning to visit some NGOs to tell their staff about the importance of blogging. We will encourage them to do blog . We also will invite them to come to Nari Jibon to learn more about blogging and if they want we will arrange a special training program for them.
We can not say that we have succeeded but we must say that we are on the right track and in future we will reach to our goals.