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Ed Webb

Paperless Tiger « buckenglish - 0 views

  • Does this jettisoning of time-honored titles mean that the paperless classroom is also lacking a creator, controller and grader?  Is the paperless classroom also a teacherless paradigm?  The answer is in some regards, yes.  I have removed myself from center stage.  I have relinquished the need to control every class.  I have stopped seeing work as stagnant…completed and submitted by students and then graded by me.  I have let go of my need to pre-plan months at a time, in favor of following the path that unfolds as we learn together.  My classes are not, however, teacherless, just less about the teaching and more about the learning.  The students know that I am ready and willing to be student to their insights, that they can teach, create, control and even evaluate their own learning.
  • In the absence of my control, the students have many choices to make
  • Teachers often say that modern students are lazy.  I have long felt that as the shifting winds of technology began to gain force, we teachers were the ones who were unwilling to do the work of rethinking our roles and meeting the students were they were learning already.  Rethinking paper as the primary tool of class is a step in the right direction because it forces a rethinking of the how and why of teaching and learning.
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    Here is an example of where I think teaching should be going
Ed Webb

Building an Internet Culture - 0 views

  • ten conclusions that might guide a country's development of a culturally appropriate Internet policy
  • Do not spend vast sums of money to buy machinery that you are going to set down on top of existing dysfunctional institutions. The Internet, for example, will not fix your schools. Perhaps the Internet can be part of a much larger and more complicated plan for fixing your schools, but simply installing an Internet connection will almost surely be a waste of money.
  • Learning how to use the Internet is primarily a matter of institutional arrangements, not technical skills
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  • Build Internet civil society. Find those people in every sector of society that want to use the Internet for positive social purposes, introduce them to one another, and connect them to their counterparts in other countries around the world. Numerous organizations in other countries can help with this.
  • Conduct extensive, structured analysis of the technical and cultural environment. Include the people whose work will actually be affected. A shared analytical process will help envision how the technology will fit into the whole way of life around it, and the technology will have a greater chance of actually being used.
  • For children, practical experience in organizing complicated social events, for example theater productions, is more important than computer skills. The Internet can be a powerful tool for education if it is integrated into a coherent pedagogy. But someone who has experience with the social skills of organizing will immediately comprehend the purpose of the Internet, and will readily acquire the technical skills when the time comes
  • Machinery does not reform society, repair institutions, build social networks, or produce a democratic culture. People must do those things, and the Internet is simply one tool among many. Find talented people and give them the tools they need. When they do great things, contribute to your society's Internet culture by publicizing their ideas.
Ed Webb

Innovate: H. Sapiens Digital: From Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives to Digital Wi... - 0 views

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    About time he revised this...
Ed Webb

Teaching Arabic to kids: How families are putting the fun back into reading | Middle Ea... - 0 views

  • There is no quicker way to suck all the fun out of reading than simultaneously translating each story page from formal Arabic into colloquial Arabic. 
  • Shendy translated some of her children’s favourite stories into colloquial Egyptian, painstakingly preserving the rhythm and rhyme. She then printed out her translations and glued them over the English in the book.
  • Marcia Lynx Qualey, a translator of Arabic children’s literature and co-founder of the World Kid Lit project, says that children's publishers are in a difficult position
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  • “They may want to publish books in a’amiya, but they also want to sell into as large a market as possible. This means being able to sell across borders, particularly into wealthier Gulf countries, but it also means selling to schools and libraries. Generally, it's only the books entirely in Fusha that are seen as ‘properly’ educational.”
  • "I had to read the story in Fusha in my head, each page, and then translate it into colloquial Arabic so that she understood the spoken Arabic words. It really bothered me. It didn't feel natural. It cut the flow for me and for her.” 
  • The couple set up a publishing house they named Ossass Stories (Ossass means "stories" in Levantine dialect), learning the trade from scratch and financing it themselves. Makhoul would work by day as a journalist and then research the publishing industry by night, drawing up cost analyses and searching for illustrators and distribution outlets. 
  • The problem with reading material for very young children learning Arabic is universal. But the lack of age-appropriate learning resources is felt more keenly by parents raising their children outside the region.
  • “If it's nursery rhymes and cartoons, and things like that, they’re all dubbed into Standard Arabic, it's very frustrating.”
  • “The problem is Standard Arabic isn't spoken anywhere.” Khalil says. “It's an ideological or theoretical standard. And so that's where linguistically the problems occur and pedagogically, as well. You're kind of creating artificial material and scenarios.”
  • I'm not saying we should do a'amiya [spoken Arabic] forever for everyone. I'm just saying for the little ones
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