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Martyn Steiner

ICTs in the Classroom-Why Use Them - 0 views

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    * Provides an justification for the use of ICTs in the classroom. * Describes the ways in which ICTs can be used to improve efficiency, educational management and pupil learning. * Provides examples of ways that ICTs can be used to enhance classroom learning.
Teachers Without Borders

Using technology in the classroom requires experience and guidance, report finds - The ... - 2 views

  • It’s older, more experienced teachers – not younger, so-called digital natives – who are experimenting more with new technology in the classroom, a new report suggests.And although Twitter, YouTube and mobile devices have infiltrated Canadian classrooms, the study finds that educators have serious concerns that students are “not-so-savvy surfers” – too prone to accept information published online as fact and be led astray.
  • “At the ground level, across the country, our impression is that teaching how to use technology takes precedence over the key critical thinking and ethical skills that youth really need,” said Matthew Johnson, director of education at Media Awareness Network, the not-for-profit group that conducted the research.
  • The report’s scope is small, involving just 10 elementary and high school teachers from across the country, but detailed. Titled Young Canadians in a Wired World, it is the third phase in an ongoing examination by Media Awareness Network of youth online. It takes a narrow focus on how teachers are using technology in the classroom and what barriers exist to maximizing these newest teaching tools.
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  • The Ottawa-based group will use the findings to shape a larger national survey it hopes to conduct next year.
  • n order to teach students how to be better digital citizens, the teachers surveyed said the training wheels have to come off the Internet: The filters schools use to block unverified websites prevent students from learning how to exercise good judgment.One elementary school teacher described a learning opportunity that arose when his students stumbled across a website sympathetic to the Nazis. The site’s racism, which was cloaked in careful prose, wasn’t obvious to the students.
  • The teachers said filters are also problematic because they prevent access to useful teaching aids. Teachers in Quebec and Ontario described not being able to show videos in class because YouTube was blocked. And one teacher in Atlantic Canada described a failed campaign to get Twitter unblocked so her students could collaborate on math questions.
  • “I don’t see a lot of new teachers coming in knowing how to apply technology,” said Zhi Su, a teacher and technology director at John Oliver Secondary School in Vancouver.Fresh out of college, few new teachers experiment with new technologies because they have the potential to be disruptive. It’s experience, and the confidence that comes with it, that is allowing teachers in their 40s and 50s to lead the way, according to the report.
Teachers Without Borders

Children severely tortured in detention centers / schools used as detention centers - 1 views

  • Syrian army and security officers have detained and tortured children with impunity during the past year, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch has documented at least 12 cases of children detained under inhumane conditions and tortured, as well as children shot while in their homes or on the street. Human Rights Watch has also documented government use of schools as detention centres, military bases or barracks, and sniper posts, as well as the arrest of children from schools.
  • “Children have not been spared the horror of Syria’s crackdown,” said Lois Whitman, children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Syrian security forces have killed, arrested, and tortured children in their homes, their schools, or on the streets. In many cases, security forces have targeted children just as they have targeted adults.”
  • Some of the arrests took place in schools. “Nazih” (not her real name), a 17-year-old girl from Tal Kalakh, told Human Rights Watch that in May 2011, security forces entered her school and arrested all the boys in her class, after questioning them about the anti-regime slogans painted on the school walls.
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  • Ala’a,” a 16-year-old boy from Tal Kalakh, told Human Rights Watch that Syrian security forces detained him for eight months, starting in May 2011, after he participated in and read political poetry at demonstrations. He was released in late January 2012 after his father bribed a prison guard with 25,000 Syrian pounds (US$436). During his detention he was held in seven different detention centres, as well as the Homs Central Prison. Ala’a told Human Rights Watch that at the Military Security branch in Homs: When they started interrogating me, they asked me how many protests I had been to, and I said “none.” Then they took me in handcuffs to another cell and cuffed my left hand to the ceiling. They left me hanging there for about seven hours, with about one-and-a-half to two centimetres between me and the floor – I was standing on my toes. While I was hanging there, they beat me for about two hours with cables and shocked me with cattle prods. Then they threw water on the ground and poured water on me from above. They added an electric current, and I felt the shock. I felt like I was going to die. They did this three times. Then I told them, “I will confess everything, anything you want.” 
  • A number of adult detainees and security force members who had defected and who were interviewed by Human Rights Watch confirmed the presence and torture of child detainees in facilities across Syria. “Samih,” a former adult detainee held in a political security facility in Latakia, told Human Rights Watch that children were subjected to worse treatment than adults, including sexual abuse, because they were children.
  • The government has used schools as detention centres, sniper posts, and military bases or barracks. “Marwan,” from the Insha’at neighborhood in Homs, and other Homs residents told Human Rights Watch that the army attacked Bahithet Al-Badiyah school on Brazil Street on November 4, and that military security forces then turned the school into a detention centre. Local activists also told Human Rights Watch that military security turned Al-Ba’ath elementary school in Joubar, another Homs neighborhood, into a military base and detention center in late December.
  • Children also told Human Rights Watch that their schools closed in 2011 due to violence, or that it was no longer safe for them to go to school. “Mohammed,” a 10-year-old boy from Homs, said, “I went to school for only one day [this year]. The teachers just gave us the books and told us not to come back. The road to school was not safe because of snipers.”
  • “Schools across Syria are closed because it’s too dangerous for students to attend, or because the military thinks schools are better used as detention centres than educational establishments,” said Whitman. “How long will Syrian children pay the price for the violence around them?” 
Teachers Without Borders

Teacher Burnout: What Are the Warning Signs? | Edutopia - 0 views

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    Research that helps us pinpoint the causes of burnout gives us guidance for how to avoid and combat it. In his landmark book, Beyond Burnout (Routledge), Cary Cherniss used intensive case study research to identify factors most likely to lead to teacher burnout:
Teachers Without Borders

A Talking Book for Africa | A World Bank Blog on ICT use in Education - 1 views

  • The 'Talking Book' is a low-cost audio device device with recording capabilities -- imagine a rubbery MP3 player about the size of a grapefuit -- rather ingeniously engineered (and re-engineered) to meet specific needs and usage scenarios in very poor communities in Africa.  It is designed for use in local languages, using locally produced content, as tool to promote literacy among primary school children (to cite just one goal and target group). One way to think of the device, Cliff said, is as a  'small portable computer without a display'.  While the project is still in its pilot stages, it is notable for its express interest in investigating solutions that are low cost and scalable from the beginning, and in rigorously monitoring and evaluating the impact of its interventions.
  • Literacy Bridge began, he said, with the idea that the most effective approach towards ending global poverty requires empowering people with better access to knowledge, and that those in greatest need are impeded by illiteracy, disability, and inadequate infrastructure. (Here's video from a talk Cliff gave at Google about the project's goals and approach to development.) The project is operationally very lean, supported financially by hundreds of individual donations and by thousands of volunteer hours. 
  • I have never heard a presentation from a project proponent about the development of an ICT device (of whatever sort) meant to be used by poor people that contained so many comments like what I heard from Cliff: "our users told us"; "we learned from our users that ..."; "what we found out when speaking with and observing our users caused us to radically change how we were thinking, and so we re-designed ..." etc.  The iterative, user-centric design process the Literacy Bridge has been engaged in to develop the Talking Book stands in stark contrast to that demonstrated by most (almost all?) of the 'ICT for development' initiatives in the education sector that come through our offices here at the World Bank. 
Teachers Without Borders

Mosoko - NRCC Wiki - 0 views

  • 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.
Teachers Without Borders

INEE | Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies - 0 views

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    This e-learning module uses the example of the Darfur refugee crisis to demonstrate how the Minimum Standards for Education: Preparedness, Response, Recovery-the foundational tool of the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE)-can be used as a framework for designing quality education programmes in conflict-induced situations.  Throughout this module, you will watch short video clips, look at photographs, and read relevant articles and reports.  A series of questions will help you understand how the INEE Minimum Standards can be used to improve the quality of education assistance.
Teachers Without Borders

Five Things US Schools Can Learn From the Rest of the World | Asia Society - 1 views

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    Five Things US Schools Can Learn From the Rest of the World
Teachers Without Borders

An update on the use of e-readers in Africa | A World Bank Blog on ICT use in Education - 0 views

  • One result is that they deliberately decided to complement the delivery of the devices with extensive engagement with local stakeholder groups, did a lot of capacity building with teachers and trainers, and tried to help align what they were doing with what was happening in the formal education system.
  • hat said, there are very real concerns in some quarters that e-book initiatives from the 'West', however well-intentioned, are potentially an important tool contributing to a subtle form of, for lack of a better term, cultural imperialism. Worldreader is apparently working on a platform for African authors and publishers to be able to distribute their works electronically, so that it will be easier for students to read books from local authors, consistent with the learning goals of local school systems.  While not downplaying the difficulties of getting large educational publishers to make their content available digitally for use by students in Africa, this desire to help promote digital marketplaces for African reading materials is perhaps the most ambitious aspect to the Worldreader initiative.
  • When they went back and asked, "what if content was digitized and made available at $1/book?", many people suddenly got very interested. 
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  • A number of research efforts of various sorts are underway trying to help provide some tentative answers to this important question, based on Worldreader pilots.  Most notable has been the iRead pilot in Ghana (here's an executive summary of the first independent evaluation commissioned by USAID [pdf]), which used a set of pre- and post- literacy tests to three groups
  • Worldreader is encouraged by the results it is seeing so far -- the biggest effects are being seen around grades 4-5, a result that many of the literacy experts attending the Worldreader presentation did not find surprising, for a variety of reasons -- but they are not yet seeing the types of 'blockbuster results' it is hoping.
  • Worldreader does appear serious and diligent in its approach, however, and so I look forward to receiving updates on the research output that I expect will emerge over time, which it plans to make available on part of its web site dedicated to "learnings". (Parenthetical note: Preliminary results from the World Bank's e-book pilot in Nigeria are expected later this year; background here, here, and here.)
  • The first challenge in this regard is (as always) money. Here Worldreader is now starting to confront a phenomenon known to many who have worked in the ICT4D area for awhile.  Finding funding support for small pilot projects, while not always easy, can be done. Large national educational technology projects are being funded in various countries around the world.  But what about the in-between level, where you do things at a much larger scale so that you can learn about how best to scale when you do things at a really big, national level?  Few funders seem able to provide support at this level.  As a result, one approach being explored is a franchising model, combining both donor and local partner funding, and a prototype 'Worldreader-in-a-Box' solution for local implementing groups is being rolled out and tested.
  • The first stage of Worldreader activities in introducing e-books and e-readers into a few small communities in Africa has convinced the organization and its backers that what it is doing is worth doing.  We no longer need to convince ourselves "if" we should be doing this, they say.  Now the question is, "how?" 
Tiffany Hoefer

Harry & Rosemary Wong: Effective Teaching - Teachers.Net Gazette - 0 views

  • The I Can’t Funeral Amanda ended her first day of school with an “I Can’t Funeral.” “This is a stolen treasure that has worked wonders for my class.  During my years of college I had to bring in a classroom method that I wanted to use in my class.  While browsing the Internet I came upon a true jewel,” she said. The I Can’t Funeral started with every student thinking of one thing they either did not feel successful in last year, or that often made them think, “I can’t do that.”  They each wrote their “I Can’t” on an index card.  Then, while playing very sad music, they placed the card in a “funeral box” and said their farewells to their “I Can’ts.”  They buried the “I Can’t” funeral box in Amanda’s car trunk. Amanda informed her students they were burying the words “I Can’t,” and wouldn’t be seeing them again.  They would dig up the funeral box at the end of the school year and celebrate how they had conquered their “I Can’ts.” Amanda said, “The students really enjoyed this, and I assured them each thing they couldn’t do or felt unsure about would be mastered during the school year.  It was an awesome day.” In January Amanda sent a note saying, “My students often ask when we are going to resurrect our ‘I Can’ts!’ . . . I often hear students saying they just conquered their ‘I can’t’ and we high five.” 
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    Highlighted area is just one good example of a nice teaching tool that some teachers could use for effective classroom teaching. Could be used as an example and ask teachers in the PD certificate to share another one. Teachers.Net Gazette may actually be a good resource as part of the curriculum build (have teachers locate an archived article and choose something they would implement.)
Teachers Without Borders

Blocking tech in classrooms impedes learning: Teachers | News | Tech | Toronto Sun - 1 views

  • Blocking social networks and banning cellphones in schools makes it difficult for teachers to do their jobs effectively in a digital world, a new report says. "School policies around technology are very frustrating to me," an elementary school teacher from Atlantic Canada says in the report from the Media Awareness Network, a Canadian non-profit that promotes digital literacy.
  • Others complained of similar restrictions. A teacher in Atlantic Canada tried to get students to use Twitter to collaborate on solving math problems, but the school refused to unblock the site. Teachers in Ontario and Quebec complained they couldn't incorporate video into their lessons because the schools wouldn't allow access to YouTube.
  • When schools do use technology in the classroom, they focus too much on teaching kids how to use devices, which they already know.
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  • Teachers said kids know how to Google, but they can't distinguish good information from the fake stuff. They can use Facebook, but they don't know how to protect their personal information. They can watch YouTube, but they don't use it to learn new things.
  • Meanwhile, teachers from schools that let them integrate technology into the class on their own terms reported successful outcomes.
Teachers Without Borders

Education |P6 in Uganda pupils cannot do fractions - report - 2 views

  • Although the introduction of Universal Primary Education (UPE) has boosted enrollment in primary schools (Uganda boasts 8.3 million children in primary schools compared to 2.3 million before 1997), numerous pupils continue to perform poorly at one of the most important aspects of basic education.
  • The report stated that, “Few primary six pupils demonstrated skills in other competences of ‘measures.’ Only about a third of the pupils (35.2 per cent) could for example tell the time shown on the clock face and merely 4.1 per cent of the pupils could apply the concept of capacity in real life situations.”The tests sampled pupils in 1,098 schools from all the districts in Uganda between the ages of nine and 15 and over.
  • Findings indicate that the main reason why pupils cannot practically apply what is taught in class is the teachers failure to identify the weakness of the pupils in the various areas of study.
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  • The report says: “the cause of this is failure to use assessment to diagnose pupils’ and to guide teaching and inadequate practice as these pupils do their work. Primary Six pupils, whose teachers had a university degree or Grade III teaching certificate, performed better than those whose head teachers had a Grade V teaching certificate. Pupils with head teachers who reside at school performed poorer than those whose head teachers live outside the school.”
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    It is evident that the sources of these problems must be sought in earlier grades, and even in the experiences of Ugandan pre-schoolers. Compare them with what I describe at http://replacingtextbooks.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/higher-mathematics-for-children/ for children in the US. There are excellent materials on fractions online. See http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Open_Education_Resources for links to some sites that have as many as 100,000 e-learning resources available. Even if students do not have computers, teachers who can access these lessons can adapt them for the classroom or for individual practice, and share them with teachers who do not have Web access. On the issue of fractions, see also http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt/Tutorials/Fractions for an approach that requires no computers, but will be enhanced with software activities fairly soon. If your students have trouble with these exercises, and you can tell us why, we will work with you and them to develop materials that meet their needs. You will also have to tell us if there are circular Ugandan foods that we can use in lessons for children who are not familiar with European/American cakes, pies, and pizza. ^_^ When you have a 4.1% success rate on a particular topic, and thus a 95.9% failure rate, it cannot be said that individual teachers have failed to recognize individual difficulties. This is evidence that the entire curriculum is misdesigned. I assume that this is some part of the holdover colonial education system from before independence, designed originally for European children, with no relation to the prior experi
Martyn Steiner

ICT in the classroom - ATL's New 2 Teaching - 2 views

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    Brief guide to using ICT in the classroom, particularly focusses on classroom management when using ICTs.
Teachers Without Borders

Ontario shows us we should support our teachers, not shame them | Education | The Guardian - 0 views

  • When the provincial government in which Levin served was elected, the Ontario school system was in trouble. In Canada each province has sole responsibility for education, and previous administrations had made structural changes, slashed funding, over promoted testing and gone to war with the unions. Perhaps most important, Levin writes: "The government was vigorously critical of schools and teachers in public." The result was industrial unrest, plummeting teacher morale, low parental confidence and stagnating pupil achievement. Maybe not surprisingly, in 2003 a new government was elected on a platform of renewing and improving public education. Today Ontario is widely acclaimed, not least by both the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) and the OECD for its rare combination of excellence and equity for all.
  • The Ontario government chose a few targeted and ambitious, but not unusual, objectives: raising standards for all, narrowing gaps, increasing participation rates, and growing public confidence in state schools. But rather than experimenting with US-style marketisation policies and tinkering with structures, it developed a rigorous programme based on evidence, and began a relentless focus on implementation and building capacity at every level.
  • "Skill" and "will" became the watchwords, not just for teachers but for everybody involved in the education system, which progressed rapidly thanks to massive investment in leadership and professional development at school, district and ministerial level.
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  • Public statements from government and ministers were switched to be deliberately supportive rather than dismissive of state schools. Finally, and most crucially, the government set out to build a respectful, collaborative relationship with teachers, unions, pupils and parents. "You cannot threaten, shame or punish people into top performance," writes Levin.
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    Ontario shows us we should support our teachers, not shame them The Canadian province improved its education system by being supportive rather than dismissive of state schools
Teachers Without Borders

In South Korean classrooms, digital textbook revolution meets some resistance - The Was... - 0 views

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    But South Korea, among the world's most wired nations, has also seen its plan to digitize elementary, middle and high school classrooms by 2015 collide with a trend it didn't anticipate: Education leaders here worry that digital devices are too pervasive and that this young generation of tablet-carrying, smartphone-obsessed students might benefit from less exposure to gadgets, not more. Those concerns have caused South Korea to pin back the ambition of the project, which is in a trial stage at about 50 schools. Now, the full rollout won't be a revolution: Classes will use digital textbooks alongside paper textbooks, not instead of them. First- and second-graders, government officials say, probably won't use the gadgets at all.
Teachers Without Borders

Researchers blast Chicago teacher evaluation reform - The Answer Sheet - The Washington... - 0 views

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    Scores of professors and researchers from 16 universities throughout the Chicago metropolitan area have signed an open letter to the city's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and Chicago school officials warning against implementing a teacher evaluation system that is based on standardized test scores. This is the latest protest against "value-added" teacher evaluation models that purport to measure how much "value" a teacher adds to a student's academic progress by using a complicated formula involving a standardized test score. Researchers have repeatedly warned against using these methods, but school reformers have been doing it in state after state anyway.
Teachers Without Borders

Global Campaign for Peace Education Newsletter: July 2012 (Intro by Matthias ... - 0 views

  • TWB and Tijuana Department of Education completed Technical Assistance Mission (Mexico) With the support of the Office of Education and Culture of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Inter-American Program on Education for Democratic Values and Practices, Teachers Without Borders (TWB) and the Baja California Department of Education recently completed a Technical Assistance Mission focusing on Peace Education in Mexican schools. As a result of this program, TWB’s Peace Education program has been endorsed as an official teacher professional development program throughout the state of Baja California. In the coming months, the program will be scaled through a partnership between Teachers Without Borders and the Baja California Department of Education and will reach 12,000 state teachers and, initially, 1,500 schools in the city of Tijuana. The Department also plans to work with Teachers Without Borders to develop Peace Education as a middle school subject.
  • Intro to Peace Ed Part I: Core Concepts – Teachers Without Borders (TWB) and National Peace Academy (NPA), online (June 19 – July 17, 2012) For more information click on the link above.
  • Intro to Peace Ed Part 2: The Scope of Peace Education – Teachers Without Borders (TWB) and National Peace Academy (NPA) – online (July 24 – August 19, 2012) For more information click on the link above.
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  • Intro to Peace Ed Part 3: Pedagogy & Practice – Teachers Without Borders (TWB) and National Peace Academy (NPA), online (September 3-30, 2012) For more information click on the link above.
Teachers Without Borders

Netherlands provides US$10 million for UNICEF Education Programme in Zambia |... - 0 views

  • LUSAKA, Zambia, 16 January 2012 (UNICEF) – The Government of the Netherlands is supporting the UNICEF education programme in Zambia with US$10 million (50 trillion Zambian kwacha) with a focus on the most vulnerable children in the country. “The overall goal of the programme is to contribute to the national targets of improving children’s access to equitable quality education, in line with the Millennium Development Goals and the Sixth National Development Plan. If we are to expect Zambia’s children and adolescents to be able to develop, learn, and participate in a protective and enabling environment, it is our duty and responsibility as a partner country to double our efforts in providing the required support to help us reap these desired results,,” said His Excellency Ambassador Harry Molenaar of the Royal Netherlands Embassy during a signing ceremony in Lusaka.
Teachers Without Borders

Guest Post | Helping Students Motivate Themselves - NYTimes.com - 1 views

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    The main way to help students develop this kind of intrinsic motivation, of course, is to have teachers take the time to learn the interests, hopes and dreams of their students. Through this relationship-building process, we can help our students connect what is happening in class each day with their self-interests. And perhaps we can develop the mutual trust needed to help us successfully challenge our students, and help students challenge us, to stretch and expand what we see as our interests, hopes and dreams.
Teachers Without Borders

Jobs galore for Kenyan teachers as Rwanda seeks tutors  - News |theeastafrica... - 0 views

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    Rwanda is planning to hire at least 4,000 teachers from the East African Community this month, opening an employment window for thousands of unemployed teachers in the region. The move is part of plans to scale up the use of English as the language of instruction in schools as well as increase its use in the largely French-speaking economy, as it seeks opportunities in the integrated EAC where English is the formal language of communication.
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