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Over the last weeks, I have been attempting to learn German through various different interfaces. Some have been a huge improvement to how I learned previously, some can be helpful in particular ways, and some just aren’t for me at all. This post shares a little of my experience using both Busuu and LiveMocha. The reason I’m reviewing them together is that I find both their advantages and their disadvantages to be very broadly similar, even if the actual systems are very different and present different types of interfaces. I’ll start with how I think these can be useful and then say where I feel they fall short.

the single most powerful treatment for ADHD is understanding ADHD in the first place. Read books. Talk with professionals. Talk with other adults who have ADHD. You’ll be able to design your own treatment to fit your own version of ADHD.

It is useful for you to have a coach, for some person near you to keep after you, but always with humor. Your coach can help you get organized, stay on task, give you encouragement or remind you to get back to work. Friend, colleague, or therapist (it is possible, but risky for your coach to be your spouse), a coach is someone to stay on you to get things done, exhort you as coaches do, keep tabs on you, and in general be in your corner. A coach can be tremendously helpful in treating ADHD.

ADHD adults need lots of encouragement. This is in part due to their having many self-doubts that have accumulated over the years. But it goes beyond that. More than the average person, the ADHD adult withers without encouragement and positively lights up like a Christmas tree when given it. They will often work for another person in a way they won’t work for themselves. This is not “bad”, it just is. It should be recognized and taken advantage of.

sequencing activity. Write the major points of the story on note cards, put those cards into a grab bag, and shake it up. Each member of a small group should then pull one of the cards from the bag and place in its correct place in a sequence. Once group members have put all the cards in their correct place in the timeline, ask the rest of the class to check if the sequencing is correct. If it is, the group should then retell the story using the cards.

give each person a blank comic page in which to retell the story. (You can find dozens of empty templates online.) Your students should then retell the major events in the story by filling in the empty blocks with pictures and dialogue (when appropriate

When your students find a character they love in something you have read, ask them to write about the further adventures of that character. This will not only help them understand what they read, it will give them practice using vocabulary specific to that character found in the piece your class read. You can compile all these short fan fiction pieces into a book for the rest of the class to read at their leisure during independent reading time.

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The Director of the Special Education Division under the Education Ministry, Bong Muk Shin, said children under the Special Education Programme are those who have difficulty learning in the mainstream environment. The special education stream is divided into three based on the difficulties in learning, hearing and seeing.

Autistic children are classified under those with learning difficulties. This is based on the general characteristics of autism such as the difficulties in focusing, communicating and socialising. Autistic children also tend to be hyperactive or prone to sudden aggression, which can at times harm themselves or others.

Bong advocates early intervention programmes for autistic children. He said such programmes could help them immensely in preparing and adjusting to the schooling environment.

The 2013 study shows that the effect of school type is largely negligible when looking across students as a whole. But for poor students, especially poor minority ethnic students, charter schools bestowed substantial learning benefits.

there is a huge amount of variation across schools and geographical regions. Even if they were, England's policy is not like the American one.

At present, Mandarin is being offered as a subject in 600 national schools

the idea of importing teachers and experts in Mandarin from China is not practical as most of these teachers from China are not fluent in Malay. So how can these teachers from China communicate with the students and teach Mandarin as a 3rd language effectively?

Besides, since 2007, our government has spent RM12,302,720 to send 409 non-Chinese students to China to learn Mandarin. How much would it cost us to import teachers from China?

The Philippines, where English is also spoken as a national language, was excluded from the 60 countries and regions whose English skills were measured by international education company EF Education First for the 2013 English Proficiency Index.

During the British colonial era, schools used English as the medium of instruction. This continued after independence in 1957 and many English teachers either came from the United Kingdom or were trained there. "In the 1960s, one of the books read and discussed in English classes by sixteen-year-olds was George Orwell's "Animal Farm", recalled Andrew Yip, 60, a shopkeeper in Ipoh, Perak. In 1970, the Malaysian government began requiring all state-funded schools to use Malay to teach, to build nationalism; though English remained a compulsory subject. Many English teachers were phased out. Over the years, students' academic performances declined.

In the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment, an international benchmark on students' performance in reading, science and mathematics, Malaysian students were in the bottom third among 74 countries. By contrast, 15-year-old students in Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea appeared to have the equivalent of another three or more years of schooling compared to Malaysian students.

To compensate, middle-class parents are increasingly sending their children for tuition, or to private schools, as they lose confidence in the quality of education in national schools.