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Mohd Yusof et al 2011 Teachers' Perceptions on the Blended Learning Environment for Spe... - 1 views

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    Challenges: several factors shown in the model that defined challenges in learning environment according to the teachers' perceptions. They had shared that, they have limited content on ICT based materials to apply and implement in the learning environment. These also included the lack of digital resources suitable for special needs learners, the non-digitalized assessment and tasks. Moreover, the elements of interactivity are limited in the learning environment. In terms of connection, the space and the facilities for special education is still limited. Moreover, it has been assumed that the special needs learners had limited confidence to use the ICT facilities and to operate it. The teachers felt that they could not the ICT facilities in learning because they lacked the skill and experience to operate the ICT facilities. "Although access to ICT is not a problem; teachers felt they lack the necessary skills to integrate ICT"(Ngah & Masood, 2006, p. 238). The government has provided the facilities, however, the teachers are unable to utilise it. Benefits In term of benefits of a blended learning environment, the teachers felt that ICT will give them the opportunity to enhance their computer literacy skills. They might only know what it is, but they can learn and use it in their teaching. Moreover, it wills build-up teacher creativity to build their own learning environment that suits the students. For example, the animation project helped the special needs students to learn a new skill and enhance their attention and motivation (Yusof & Aziz, 2010; Yusof & Song, 2010). According to previous research by Mayer & Moreno (2002), Mayer's principle had shown the benefit of using the multimedia as the tool help enhance student engagement. He also stated the guideline to ensure the suitable elements in the multimedia content (Mayer & Moreno, 2002; Yusof & Aziz, 2010). The use of ICT helps them to minimize the use of paper, and the activities on a computer ca
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Hall, J 2014 Children's Human Rights and Public Schooling in the US (abstract) - 0 views

  • In certain areas, the US may have a better track record compared to other nations. However, human rights concerns are confronted everyday by people in this country, including children.
  • against the backdrop of neoliberal expansion, serious human rights violations are taking place among children in the US. The daily struggles among groups of school children in the US are specifically considered
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    Inside: "In an economony increasingly shaped by neoliberal reform, the conditions of children everywhere are deteriorating. Makret logics supported by translational bodies, networks, constituents, and policies - such as the UM, the World Bank/IMF, the WTO, and the World Economic Forum and the World Water Forum - bear out such outcomes (Goldman 2006, 2006; Goodman, 2011; Kloby, 2004). This economy helps shape policies and interaction in al spaces, including public schools in the US. When it comes to schools children are often silenced further by the gutting of school budgets, unequal funding, racial sorting/segretaion/violence, sexual harassment...targeted cuts to ESL and SE programs, and overal privatization. Given their vulnerabilities, for children to have any chance to succeed there muust be a significant shift in thinking among the public. The CRC must be debated in the US inlcuding a discussion of its problems and promise/potential. The US must ratify an improved version fo the CRC, live up to iy, and other nations must too... Public schools could be the forum where these conversations begin. Regrettably, many are unfamiliar with this convention and/or are unaware of its existence."
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Assessing No Child Left Behind and the Rise of Neoliberal Education Policies - 1 views

  • No Child Left Behind and other education reforms promoting high-stakes testing, accountability, and competitive markets continue to receive wide support from politicians and public figures. This support, the author suggests, has been achieved by situating education within neoliberal policies that argue that such reforms are necessary within an increasingly globalized economy, will increase academic achievement, and will close the achievement gap.
  • the author offers preliminary data suggesting that the reforms are not achieving their stated goals. Consequently, educators need to question whether neoliberal approaches to education should replace the previously dominant social democratic approaches.
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Introduction - Issues ...about Change, Inclusion: The Pros and Cons, Volume 4, Number 3 - 0 views

  • Philosophical, educational, and legal arguments for and against greater inclusion are also presented
  • discussion of implications for educational practitioners and district policy makers
  • Reynolds (1988) uses the term "progressive inclusion" to describe the evolution of services to those with various disabilities. He and others (Winzer, 1993; Stainback, Stainback, & Bunch, 1989b) point out that as the United States emerged as a nation, no educational services were available to people with disabilities
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Job prospects bleak for adults with autism | Disability Now - 0 views

  • The National Autistic Society’s (NAS) Don’t Write Me Off report says that only 15 per cent of adults with autism in the UK are in full-time paid work and that many of those not in work are also excluded from the benefits system and rely on friends and family for financial support. More than a third of those surveyed said that their disability employment adviser’s knowledge of autism was “very bad” or “bad”. Peter Griffin, who has Asperger syndrome and is from Hertfordshire, works on a check-out at a supermarket one day a week. He has a masters degree in astrophysics and would like to teach maths.
  • The National Autistic Society’s (NAS) Don’t Write Me Off report says that only 15 per cent of adults with autism in the UK are in full-time paid work and that many of those not in work are also excluded from the benefits system and rely on friends and family for financial support.
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What you can claim | Disability Rights UK - 0 views

  • education benefits education grants education maintenance allowance
  • Disabled students
  • education grants education maintenance allowance
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  • education benefits - You may be able to get free school meals for your children if you are on a low income. Local authorities also supply free school meals for certain age groups. You may also be able to get help with the costs of travel to school or be entitled to a school clothing grant. For more information contact your Local Authority. education funding - For information on funding further, higher and postgraduate education see our education factsheets page. education grants - see Factsheet F48 - grants for students aged 16 and over in school and further education.
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Scandinavia school science slowcoach Norway gets left behind in PISA polls / News / The... - 0 views

  • “We must have higher ambitions than staying around the average level among OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries,” declared the Minister at Tuesday’s press conference in Oslo.
  • Norway is within the OECD (mean) average bracket when it comes to the sciences (494), and slightly below it in math (501). But these are still not results, “we can be satisfied with,” added Minister Isaksen.
  • The PISA 2012 survey results were slightly different when it came to Norwegian students’ reading skills. They have improved since the last time, albeit just slightly, with 503 in 2009, against 504 now – though female pupils still did better than their male peers.
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  • “I am convinced that teachers want more professional input,” declared Minister Isaksen.   “Good teachers will have the opportunity to be even better with our teacher boost,” he concluded.
  • below Finland with its 524 points, Norway also comes second amongst the Nordics. Denmark gets 496 points, while Iceland and Sweden ‘tie’ with 483. The OECD’s mean average is 496.
  • Math skill levels measured by the PISA 2012 presented a significant decline of 9 points compared to 2009 (external link) to 489.As a Nordic country, Norway also trails Finland, Denmark, and Iceland. These countries got 519, 500, and 493, respectively. Sweden got 478. Norway’s scores when it came to science subjects also dropped compared with 2009, getting 500 against 495 now (external link).
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10 questions to understanding PISA results | The EDifier - Center for Public Education - 0 views

  • The rhetoric pertaining to the quality of our public schools is certainly going to be amplified tomorrow, with critics lamenting how the results show our public schools are in dire straits while others will argue the results are meaningless
  • an assessment of reading, math, and science literacy given every three years to 15-year-old students in public and private schools in about 65 countries.
  • international institution Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) coordinates the development and administration of PISA worldwide
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  • PISA is designed to measure how well students can apply their knowledge to real-world situations. To measure such skills, the test items on PISA are primarily “constructed response,” meaning the test-taker has to write their answers to the questions, and there are few multiple-choice items.
  • PISA is one of the few tools we have to compare the outcomes of high school students internationally.  PISA provides valuable information on how prepared high school students are for postsecondary success whether in the workplace, career training, or higher education.
  • Every industrialized country now educates all their students, including language minority, special needs and low-performing students. Every country that participates in PISA must adhere to strict sampling rules to ensure the country’s results are nationally representative of all 15-year-old students. Indeed, the decision to test secondary students at age 15 was made in part because young people at that age are still subject to compulsory schooling laws in most participating nations, which provides more assurance that PISA will capture the broadest sample.
  • OECD reports statistically significant differences in performance between nations, which is a more accurate way to look at PISA rankings than a straight listing of average scores.
  • Does PISA measure the effectiveness of public school systems? Not completely, for three reasons: 1) PISA results are representative of the performance of all 15-year-olds in participating countries including those  attending private schools; 2) PISA makes no attempt to isolate schools from outside factors such as poverty or high proportions of non-native language speakers that may have an impact on  performance —such factors are important to include in the mix when evaluating the effectiveness of each country’s schools; and 3) No single measure can incorporate every outcome we expect from our public schools
  • look at how much time other countries give teachers for professional development, how much they pay their teachers, how much time teachers spend in the classroom, how much flexibility exists at the local level, how special needs students are taught, and how much time students spend in school.
  • see PISA results as an opportunity to assess if best practices in teaching and learning in other countries can also work for secondary schools here in the U.S.
  • just because a high-performing or high-gaining country does something does not mean it will work in U.S. schools.
  • Many analysts observe that poverty has a greater impact on student performance in the U.S. than elsewhere. For one thing, the U.S. has the highest child poverty rates among industrialized countries. For another, students in the U.S. who live in poverty tend to have less access to resources that research consistently shows impact student achievement, including highly effective teachers, access to rigorous curriculum, and high quality pre-k programs.
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Corkboard Connections: 12 Ways to Motivate Reluctant Readers - 0 views

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    "Here are a dozen strategies that are often included in Reading Workshop, and none of them involve stickers, certificates, or pizza. External rewards may work in the short term, but the best way to foster a love of reading is to help your students discover that a great book is a reward in itself! "
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Developing Countries and Problems They Face :: Papers - 0 views

  • 70% of the population in Third World countries do not have access to any organised health care.
  • four adults in ten who can read and write and less than one in four children go to secondary school
  • Work can give us identity, security and the means to meet many of our other basic needs
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  • world unemployment stands at around 500 millions, 300 millions of there are in the less-developed countries.
  • many LDCs suffer from wars
  • also force many people to leave their homes and become refugees in other safer countries
  • Wars destroy crops, homes, schools and Hospitals etc. causing even more poverty.
  • neighbouring countries may have been developing, but a sudden influx of refugees with no money or food can make that country poor again.
  • Natural disasters
  • a lot of natural disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, and droughts. Disasters like there destroy homes and crops, causing people to become poor again
  • All LDCs have had to borrow money from the banks of rich countries. They have to pay interest on these loans and this money could have been spent on development
  • because the interest is so high, in that case the LDCs will get poorer and MDCs will get richer
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    (clearly not well-proofread, but some points are worth considering I think)
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How To Kill A Country - Samantha Power - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • In 1980, after a civil war that cost 30,000 lives, the black majority took charge of the country, which was renamed Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe—the nationalist leader whom Smith had branded a "Marxist terrorist" and jailed for more than a decade; a man who had once urged his followers to stop wearing shoes and socks to show they were willing to reject the trappings of European civilization—became President.
  • 1. Destroy the engine of productivity
  • 2. Bury the truth
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  • 4. Legislate the impossible
  • 3. Crush dissent
  • 6. Scare off foreigners
  • 8. Ignore a deadly enemy
  • 9. Commit genocide
  • 10. Blame the imperialists
  • Mugabe will have the last word on Zimbabwe's fate. His cronies are clearly worried that if he clings to power indefinitely, the ruling party will sink with him. He is under pressure to choose a successor by the end of the year. But at seventy-nine, Mugabe may well decide to stick around, relying—though he would never admit it—on the United States and Britain to bail out his people with food aid.
  • For all their differences, Mugabe and Ian Smith share a basic misconception about power: they both fail to realize that a government cannot survive indefinitely when it advances the political and economic desires of the few at the expense of the many.
  • http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/12/how-to-kill-a-country/302845/
  • 5. Teach hate
  • 7. Invade a neighbor
  • How could the breadbasket of Africa have deteriorated so quickly into the continent's basket case? The answer is Robert Mugabe, now seventy-nine, who by his actions has compiled something of a "how-to" manual for national destruction. Although many of his methods have been applied elsewhere, taken as a whole his ten-step approach is more radical and more comprehensive than that of other despots. The Zimbabwe case offers some important insights. It illustrates the prime importance of accountability as an antidote to idiocy and excess. It highlights the lasting effects of decolonization—limited Western influence on the continent and a reluctance by African leaders to criticize their own. And it offers a warning about how much damage one man can do, very quickly.
  • Although Zimbabwe is as broken as any country on the planet, it offers a testament not to some inherent African inability to govern but to a minority rule as oppressive and inconsiderate of the welfare of citizens as its ignominious white predecessor. The country's economy in 1997 was the fastest growing in all of Africa; now it is the fastest shrinking. A onetime net exporter of maize, cotton, beef, tobacco, roses, and sugarcane now exports only its educated professionals, who are fleeing by the tens of thousands. Although Zimbabwe has some of the richest farmland in Africa, children with distended bellies have begun arriving at school looking like miniature pregnant women.
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Problems of Development Today | Globalization101 - 0 views

  • the problems facing developing countries revolve around what are generally called “structural constraints” to development
  • a modern economy cannot function without a division and diversification of labor. Thus, countries with small populations may have trouble developing and gaining access to markets, while landlocked countries may struggle to integrate with global markets and expand their economies.
  • Other common constraints on development are high economic poverty, hunger, high mortality rates, unsafe water supplies, poor education systems, corrupt governments, war, and poor sanitation. These factors all combine to create what the World Bank calls “poverty traps”—cycles that must be broken for countries to develop
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  • geographic advantages do not always result in sound development in cases when governments squander valuable natural resources. The World Bank, therefore, recommends that countries focus on six areas of policy to improve chances of development: Investment in education and health Increasing productivity of small farms Improving infrastructure (for example, roads) Developing an industrial policy to promote manufacturing Promoting democracy and human rights Ensuring environmental protection
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Chronic Diseases and the Developing World | Globalization101 - 0 views

  • Deaths and disabilities from chronic disease are indeed preventable with the right, timely investments. Funded initiatives and government policy can play a vital role in reducing obesity, inactivity and tobacco-use, but they are not enough. When the governments of the United Kingdom forced schools to offer healthier foods in the cafeteria, many students still opted to bring their own lunch instead.23 The decision to change lifestyle choices and habits cannot be imposed on a population. Until people are convinced of the need to live in a more health fashion, chronic diseases will continue to plague developing and developed societies alike.
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WHO | Environment and health in developing countries - 0 views

  • environmental factors are a root cause of a significant burden of death, disease and disability – particularly in developing countries
  • The resulting impacts are estimated to cause about 25% of death and disease globally, reaching nearly 35% in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa (1). This includes environmental hazards in the work, home and broader community/living environment.
  • A significant proportion of that overall environmental disease burden can be attributed to relatively few key areas of risk. These include: poor water quality, availability, and sanitation; vector-borne diseases; poor ambient and indoor air quality; toxic substances; and global environmental change.
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  • simple preventive measures exist to reduce the burden of disease from such risks, although systematic incorporation of such measures into policy has been more of a challenge.
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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights - 0 views

  • THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
  • Article 7. All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
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Streaming pupils by ability in primary school widens the attainment gap - Institute of ... - 0 views

  • The practice of "streaming" children by ability in the early years of primary school is widening the achievement gap between children from better-off homes and those facing disadvantage
  • while relatively high-attaining pupils do better if placed in a top stream than they would in schools which do not have streaming, those given a place in the middle or lower streams do worse than they would if there were no streaming, the research finds.
  • streaming in primary schools would appear to increase the gap between higher- and lower-attaining pupils, and also to accentuate socio-economic differences, because more of those from poorer backgrounds tend on average to be in the lower streams.
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  • a child being placed in a top stream enjoyed a significant positive benefit, in terms of reading, maths and overall results by the end of year two, compared to children who had not been streamed. But pupils placed in middle or bottom streams fared significantly worse in their reading and overall results than those who were not streamed, while those placed in the bottom sets also fared significantly worse than their non-streamed peers in maths.
  • pupils, of any given ability level, tended to do better if placed in a class with high-performing peers. It was therefore logical that, in a streamed system in which such classmates were only available to other high-performers, those already adjudged to be doing well enough to be placed in a top stream would tend to benefit disproportionately.
  • "Streaming…advantages those who are already high attainers, disadvantaging those who are placed in middle or lower groups who are deprived of working with those who are more advanced."
  • Bottom stream pupils are more likely to have behaviour problems, to be from poor backgrounds and to have less educated mothers, the researchers have shown in the past.
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