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SAfrican govt asked to include Indian languages in curriculum - 0 views

www.indianexpress.com/...747402

Indian South Africa languages curriculum reform

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 15 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • A group of South African Indian teachers have asked the Education Ministry to recognise five Indian languages Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati and Telugu as optional third language in the school curriculum. The five main mother tongues of South African Indians will die out completely in 50 years if they are not taught as formal school subjects, the teachers said.
Teachers Without Borders

In India, the Premji Foundation Tries to Improve Public Education - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...18teach.html

india education foundation reform curriculum

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 22 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • PANTNAGAR, India — The Nagla elementary school in this north Indian town looks like many other rundown government schools. Sweater-clad children sit on burlap sheets laid in rows on cold concrete floors. Lunch is prepared out back on a fire of burning twigs and branches.
  • But the classrooms of Nagla are a laboratory for an educational approach unusual for an Indian public school. Rather than being drilled and tested on reproducing passages from textbooks, students write their own stories. And they pursue independent projects — as when fifth-grade students recently interviewed organizers of religious festivals and then made written and oral presentations.
  • Nagla and 1,500 other schools in this Indian state, Uttarakhand, are part of a five-year-old project to improve Indian primary education that is being paid for by one of the country’s richest men, Azim H. Premji, chairman of the information technology giant Wipro. Education experts at his Azim Premji Foundation are helping to train new teachers and guide current teachers in overhauling the way students are taught and tested at government schools.
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  • But within India, there is widespread recognition that the country has not invested enough in education, especially at the primary and secondary levels.
  • In the last five years, government spending on education has risen sharply — to $83 billion last year, up from less than half that level before. Schools now offer free lunches, which has helped raise enrollments to more than 90 percent of children.
  • But most Indian schools still perform poorly. Barely half of fifth-grade students can read simple texts in their language of study, according to a survey of 13,000 rural schools by Pratham, a nonprofit education group. And only about one-third of fifth graders can perform simple division problems in arithmetic. Most students drop out before they reach the 10th grade.
  • Those statistics stand in stark contrast to China, where a government focus on education has achieved a literacy rate of 94 percent of the population, compared with 64 percent in India.
Teachers Without Borders

Will a More International Curriculum Help Indian Students? - India Real Time - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...urriculum-help-indian-students

India curriculum reform education schools

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 30 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Indian education has often been criticized for focusing on rote learning rather than problem solving. Experts say the curriculum in most schools is outdated and disconnected from the actual world.
  • Randeep Kaur, education adviser at Plan India, a New Delhi-based children’s organization, said most Indian students learned only with the aim of scoring marks but never with the intention of understanding and enhancing their knowledge. “How many of them (students) can actually make use of what they had learned?” she asked.
  • The new program of study, called the CBSE-i will put less emphasis on methods such as memorization and greater focus on developing analytical and communication skills.
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  • World literature will also have greater space in this curriculum.
  • Anjali Chhabra, education officer at the CBSE in New Delhi told India Real Time that subjects will be taught with a more global perspective. For instance, when it comes to history there will be more space for world history, rather than just Indian history, as is the case in the regular curriculum.
  • Languages are an important component of the international curriculum. The students are also expected to study three languages, rather than just two. Compulsory languages are English and either Hindi or another local language, as is already the case in the regular curriculum, plus a foreign language. Options could include French, Russian, Spanish, German and Portuguese.
  • So far, only ten schools across India have applied for the international syllabus.
  • In a major leap for India’s education system the country’s Central Board of Secondary Education has decided to go international with a brand new curriculum.
Teachers Without Borders

Indian culture reflected poorly in school syllabi, finds survey - Hindustan Times - 0 views

www.hindustantimes.com/...Article1-801310.aspx

culture school survey India report study

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 24 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Teachers Without Borders on 24 Jan 12
     
    The survey found that texts such as Ramayana, Mahabharata and tales from Panchatantra, Jataka and Hitopadesha were omitted from textbooks but Aesop's Fables had been included. "It is shocking that the south and north-eastern parts of India are almost neglected in the textbooks which are overwhelmingly tilted toward central and north India," said the survey report, which rated books on different parameters such as tradition and culture, history, heritage, Indian thought and spirituality.
Teachers Without Borders

How cycling set deprived Indian girls on a life-long journey | Bike blog | Environment ... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...g-indian-schoolgirls-bike-blog

India girls' education girls schools bicycles access EFA

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 01 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • In Bihar, one of India's poorest and most populous states, half of the women and a quarter of the men are illiterate, and about 90% of its 104 million inhabitants live in rural areas. Life here is particularly difficult for girls, and one of the greatest hindrances to their development is the simple journey to school. For many, the trip is long, expensive and dangerous.But here, in rural Bihar, we recently saw that a two-wheeled solution to the problem has been found.Three years ago the state's new chief minister Nitish Kumar adopted a "gender agenda" and set about redressing his state's endemic gender imbalances in an attempt to boost development in one of India's most backward states. His vision was to bring a sense of independence and purpose to his state's young women, and the flagship initiative of this agenda is the Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojna, a project that gives schoolgirls 2,000 rupees (about £25) to purchase a bicycle.
  • 871,000 schoolgirls have taken to the saddle as a result of the scheme. The number of girls dropping out of school has fallen and the number of girls enrolling has risen from 160,000 in 2006-2007 to 490,000 now.
  • Girls like Pinki Kumari (15), a student from the high school in Desari, previously had 14km round trip each day. When she got back home, she would have to help her mother with daily chores. "At the end of the day, it became tiring and attending school became a ritual. I hardly got any time to study,"
Teachers Without Borders

India announces $35 tablet computer to help lift villagers out of poverty - The Washing... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQAPT8PNL_story.html

India technology education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 08 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • NEW DELHI — India introduced a cheap tablet computer Wednesday, saying it would deliver modern technology to the countryside to help lift villagers out of poverty.
  • Developer Datawind is selling the tablets to the government for about $45 each, and subsidies will reduce that to $35 for students and teachers.
  • “This is not just for us. This is for all of you who are disempowered,” he said. “This is for all those who live on the fringes of society.”Despite a burgeoning tech industry and decades of robust economic growth, there are still hundreds of thousands of Indians with no electricity, let alone access to computers and information that could help farmers improve yields, business startups reach clients, or students qualify for university.
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  • The Android 2.2-based device has two USB ports and 256 megabytes of RAM. Despite hopes for a solar-powered version — important for India’s energy-starved hinterlands — no such option is currently available.
  • India, after raising literacy to about 78 percent from 12 percent when British rule ended, is now focusing on higher education with a 2020 goal of 30 percent enrollment. Today, only 7 percent of Indians graduate from high school.
Teachers Without Borders

IRIN Asia | BANGLADESH: Bringing education to the Bihari minority | Asia | Bangladesh |... - 0 views

www.irinnews.org/report.aspx

inclusive education Bangladesh

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 13 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • DHAKA, 27 August 2010 (IRIN) - Helping the over 200,000-strong Bihari minority in Bangladesh learn how to read and write is key to their full integration, say activists.
  • The once stateless, Urdu-speaking minority who only recently gained citizenship, were shut out of state schools for decades. “These communities are highly scarred having spent generations in the camp[s]… Though government schools have started enrolling Bihari children in the past 8-10 years, so much more needs to be done,” C.R. Abrar, the group’s coordinator, told IRIN.
  • In 1971 Biharis - named after their Indian region of origin - found themselves in a diplomatic dilemma: Linguistically tied to Urdu-speaking Pakistan, they were living in Bengali-speaking Bangladesh when the latter won independence from what today is Pakistan.
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  • Over half of all Biharis in Bangladesh are under 25, so the struggle for education resonates with them. “Without doubt literacy remains the biggest barrier to our assimilation,” said Ahmed Ilias, executive director of Al-Falah, Bangladesh, the only registered NGO working with the Bihari community.
Teachers Without Borders

Notes from the Field | Not again! - 0 views

we.care.org/...not_again.html

Chile earthquake Haiti

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 02 Mar 10 - Cached
  • And yet, there's an additional heartache for Haiti in hearing this news. Why was it so much worse here? Chile's quake registered at 8.8, about 500 times more powerful than Haiti's. But the numbers of Haitian dead have already surpassed 220,000 – close to the horrendous toll of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Chile's dead, at last report, number some 700 – a tragic loss, but orders of magnitude fewer than Haiti's. What explains this deadly disparity?
  • Where Chile had strict building codes, Haiti suffered from haphazard construction. Poor, rural people had for years flooded into the capital, living in precariously built shantytowns. Lack of enforcement, corruption and weak governance all contributed to grossly magnify the proportions of the catastrophe. It's easy enough to see the exceptions here, which might have been the rule if earthquake-resistant building codes had been enforced: a few solid structures still tower above the rubble – scarred and cracked, to be sure, but standing all the same.
  • I worry that, as so many times in the past, Haiti will quickly fade from public consciousness, once the world's TV screens are no longer broadcasting terrifying pictures from Port-au-Prince. All the more important that those of us who are working hand in hand with the Haitian people maintain our commitment for the long term, not just with material support but with the determination to rebuild safely and prudently.
Teachers Without Borders

Mosoko - NRCC Wiki - 0 views

wiki.nrcc.noklab.com/Mosoko

mosoko mobile phones Nairobi Africa development developing nations cell phone wiki audio wiki Nokia

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 09 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Two recent examples show how mobile phones can improve peoples' access to information in developing economies. Robert Jensen studied the effect of the growth in mobile phone use in fishing villages in the Indian state of Kerala. As cellular coverage grew from nothing to 100% from 1997 to 2000, the fish market became more efficient: fishermen knew where that days' catch would fetch a good price, price fluctuations between villages diminished, and fewer fish were discarded at the end of each day. A second example shows how markets for agricultural goods -- accessed via phone -- aided farmers in East Africa. The Kenyan Agricultural Commodity Exchange makes nationwide prices available through text messages. Prior to the Exchange, the main source of pricing information was the middleman to whom the farmers were selling -- people who were motivated to buy the commodity as cheaply as possible. Armed with better pricing information, farmers can now sell their goods for prices closer to market rates.
  • Billions of people have mobile phones but only a small fraction of those people have access to the Web. We are focusing on three main types of services that are widespread on the Web, but are absent in developing regions: classified advertising, social networks, and information sharing through Wikis. In all three service aspects, we seek to provide an intuitive and dynamic infrastructure for user-generated content. Craigslist, in the US, and similar free classified services in other developed countries have created marketplaces for exchanging goods and services where none existed before. Their web-based access cannot be brought to developing countries in the near future. Instead, what if we could assist people in forming similar types of connections using only their mobile phones?
  • Short-term goals: Focus on one domain: apartment listings. Build a prototype and deploy it for a month in Nairobi for free.
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  • Provide more powerful interfaces to users who do have Internet access. These interfaces will be both through standard computer web browsers and through customized applications that run on higher-end phones. Currently, the vast majority of phones in developing regions are not capable of running customized applications (e.g. Java). Use speech recognition to improve matching process.
  • This project seeks to develop an "audio wiki" -- an open platform (like Wikipedia) that people can freely access and contribute to, but rather than using a desktop computer, they use a cell phone. This means that all content will be spoken rather than written, and there are a host of interesting challenges in user interfaces, speech recognition, and audio processing that need to be tackled.
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