Skip to main content

Home/ Teachers Without Borders/ Group items tagged connectivity

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Teachers Without Borders

How do you evaluate a plan like Ceibal? | A World Bank Blog on ICT use in Education - 0 views

blogs.worldbank.org/...evaluating-ceibal

ICT ICT4D UNESCO TWB OLPC laptops technology education children teacher development teachers

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 19 Dec 09 - Cached
  • n many ways, Ceibal can, and perhaps should, be seen not so much as an education project, but as a larger societal transformation project (of the sort often associated with e-government initiatives), with the education system as the primary and initial dissemination vector.
  • Under Plan Ceibal (earlier blog post here), Uruguay is the first country in the world to ensure that all primary school students (or at least those in public schools) have their own personal laptop.  For free.  (The program is being extended to high schools, and, under a different financial scheme, to private schools as well).  Ceibal is about more than just 'free laptops for kids', however.  There is a complementary educational television channel. Schools serve as centers for free community wi-fi, and free connectivity has been introduced in hundreds of municipal centers around the country as well.  There are free local training programs for parents and community members on how to use the equipment.  Visiting Uruguay last week, I was struck by how many references there were to 'one laptop per teacher' (and not just 'one laptop per child', which has been the rallying cry for a larger international initiative and movement). 
  • There is no doubt about the numbers (over 380,000) in Uruguay -- the laptops are not sitting in boxes under an awning at the Ministry of Education collecting dust.  You see them everywhere you see school children.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Notably, and tellingly, Plan Ceibal rolled out first in rural and poor communities, with schools in the capital city of Montevideo reached only in the final stage of deployment.  This stands in stark contrast to the way educational technologies make their way into schools and communities pretty much everywhere else in the world, where urban population centers and wealthy communities are typically first in line (and in many places, the line may end with them!)
  • Standing amidst the computer-enabled hubbub of activity that now characterizes the standard learning environments in Uruguayan schools, there can be no denying that something new and different is happening in a big way. Every student in every classroom in every school (and, just as importantly, in every home) is different by multiple orders of magnitude
  • What might the consequences be if young people in Uruguay have what is essentially an 'extra' ten years of technology literacy -- what might happen during those ten years (and beyond) as a result? No one knows, but it will be quite interesting to watch.
Teachers Without Borders

Ravaged Nigerian Village Is Haunted by Massacre - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...10nigeria.html

Nigeria violence Jos massacre

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 10 Mar 10 - Cached
  • DOGO NA HAWA, Nigeria — Nightmare images haunt this dusty sun-baked village, fresh memories of tall young men emerging from darkness to slash the unarmed with long knives in a frenzy of ethnic and religious hatred.
  • On Tuesday, a day after hundreds were buried in mass graves here, groups of villagers in this Christian farming community a few miles south of the central Nigerian metropolis of Jos sat mutely among their mud-brick homes, remembering Sunday’s horror.
  • Some of the small houses had been burned in the attack: tin roofs were caved in and twisted, facades were charred and carbonized hulks of vehicles littered the dirt streets. Traces of blood were evident in the sandy soil.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Estimates by officials and human rights groups of the number of dead have ranged from 300 to more than 500 in the attack here and in two nearby villages, Zot and Ratsat.
  • The people here spoke of a well-organized gang of dozens who stealthily surrounded the village before dawn. They had come on foot from the low hills surrounding this rocky plateau, Muslim herdsmen apparently bent on revenge for similar killings in January and angry over what one rights group said were cases of cattle rustling.
  • A separate corps — men with machetes, or “cutlasses” as some villagers described them — began their work. “I saw them with very long, white swords,” Mr. Pam said. “Some were dressed in black, and some in camouflage.” The men were ruthlessly efficient, and in halting sentences the villagers described the carnage that followed. “They killed my daughter and my son,” Ezekiel Chwang said. “It was Sunday night. They surrounded our house. They were shouting.” He climbed into a tree to escape the marauders, and dropped back down after they had left, to find a horrific scene in his home. The men, he said, had discovered his 6-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son sleeping in the bedroom. They slit their necks with a machete, then set them on fire.
  • human rights experts on this region said it was all too reminiscent of previous episodes, including the killing of Muslims by Christians in January. “There many similarities as far as the targeting of unarmed residents, including women and children,” said Eric Guttschuss of Human Rights Watch.
  • Perhaps 3,000 have died in these ethnic-religious conflicts in the region surrounding this village since 2001, in the estimates of rights groups. There have been investigations and commissions of inquiry, but little retribution. The police here, known for their summary methods, say they have already arrested around 100 people in connection with Sunday’s killings.
Teachers Without Borders

Charity Report: Water - A Child's Right - 0 views

www.soschildrensvillages.ca/...Water-Child-Right-111.aspx

water water_day water_crisis MDGs Africa children

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 02 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Imagine, for a moment, that you had to walk for miles to find clean water. Imagine again, if you lived in a country devastated by civil war and humanitarian disaster, and your only source of water was contaminated by the runoff from refugee camps—garbage, human excrement, and people bathing.
  • UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon issued a statement today. “Water is the source of life and the link that binds all living beings on this planet,” he said. “It is connected directly to all our United Nations goals: improved maternal and child health and life expectancy, women's empowerment, food security, sustainable development and climate change adaptation and mitigation.” There is good news: there have been vast improvements in water and sanitation—so much so that 87% of the world population can now access safe drinking water, and is on-target to meet the targets identified in the Millennium Development Goals. The majority of these improvements have been in rural areas.
  • 90% of the 1.1 billion people forced to defecate in open areas due to a lack of toilets or latrines are rural dwellers. Conditions such as these are the primary cause of the 1.5 million deaths of children under five years old due to diarrhoeal diseases, the UN reports. Such needless deaths have been called “an affront to our common humanity” by Ban Ki-Moon. In addition to faecal contamination risks, poor personal hygiene, agricultural and livestock runoff, and inadequate garbage disposal services can spread water-borne diseases.
Teachers Without Borders

INDIA: 100-Dollar Laptops Bring In Distant Kids - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views

ipsnews.net/news.asp

India OLPS ICT education schools computers

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 14 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Responding to the lack of computer training in Mukteshwar’s schools, Veena Sethi, a retired Delhi University professor, set up two used personal computers in the basement of her home with the aim of bringing the basics of computing to school children.
  • UDAAN, however, moved on. A partnership with Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University made it possible for the NGO to introduce the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme in selected schools in Mukteshwar in May 2010. OLPC’s stated mission is to provide a means for learning, self-expression, and exploration to some two billion children in developing countries with little or no access to education.
  • "The XO machine is ideal for children in remote places where the classroom may be no more than the shade of a tree," explains Satish Jha, who heads OLPC in India. The XO laptop’s wireless connectivity and free, open-source "Sugar" operating system allows children to reshape, reinvent, and reapply both software and content. "The laptops grow with the children," Jha said.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Ashish Garg, country director for the United Nations Global e-Schools and Communities Initiative, told IPS that she sees little difference between students emerging from India’s schools today and those who did so 20 years ago when the country first announced plans to introduce ICTE in its 1.2 million schools. "They may as well have been working on typewriters.
  • Nanyang University is already preparing an evaluation report based on tests in three areas of cognitive empowerment - computer self-efficacy, academic self-efficacy, technological literacy and functional literacy.
Teachers Without Borders

UNGEI - News and Events - Partnering with the philanthropic community to promote educat... - 0 views

www.ungei.org/...index_2772.html

UNESCO education EFA MDGs

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 05 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • “Most countries in the very poor world cannot afford to provide free access to secondary education,” Prof. Sachs told UNICEF Radio. “Even the Millennium Development Goals fall short of what they need to be, because they only talk about primary education.”
  • In addition to financial support, schools need to provide young people with a quality education, including Internet access, to help develop a globally connected curriculum that meets students’ needs.
  • Teachers Without Borders on 05 Mar 11
     
    NEW YORK, USA, 1 March 2011 - The United Nations Economic and Social Council is meeting at UN Headquarters in New York this week on partnering with the philanthropic community to promote education for all children.  AUDIO: Listen now Participants hope to accelerate progress in achieving universal education by engaging supporters from the private sector and philanthropic community to help fund and promote global education initiatives.
Teachers Without Borders

Education failures fan the flames in the Arab world « World Education Blog - 1 views

efareport.wordpress.com/...n-the-flames-in-the-arab-world

Egypt Tunisia unemployment education EFA democracy teachers

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 27 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Education is a key ingredient of the political crisis facing Arab states. Superficially, the education profile of the region is starting to resemble that of East Asia. The past two decades have witnessed dramatic advances in primary and secondary school enrollment, with a step-increase in tertiary education. Many governments have increased public spending on education. The 7% of GDP that Tunisia invests in the sector puts the country near the top of the global league table for financial effort.
  • In Egypt, the education group most likely to be unemployed is university level and above, followed by post-secondary. Around one quarter of the country’s male university graduates are unemployed, and almost half of its female graduates.
  • For all the expansion of access and investment in education, the Arab states have some of the world’s worst performing education systems. The problems start early. In this year’s Global Monitoring Report we carry a table showing the distribution of performance across different countries in reading test scores at grade 4. In Kuwait, Qatar and Morocco, over 90% of students scored below the lowest benchmark, indicating that they lacked even basic comprehension.  In fact, these countries held the bottom three positions in a group of 37 countries covered.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The median (or middle-performing) student in Algeria, Egypt and Syria scores below the low-benchmark; in Tunisia they score just above. In other words, half of the students in each country have gone through eight years of school to arrive at a level that leaves them with no working knowledge of basic math. In Saudi Arabia and Qatar, over 80% of students fall below the low benchmark. The median student in both performs at around the same level as their counterpart in Ghana and El Salvador – and Qatar is the worst performing country covered in the survey.
  • Why are education systems in the Middle East and North Africa performing so badly? In many countries, teachers are poorly trained – and teaching is regarded as a low-status, last-resort source of employment for entrants to the civil service. There is an emphasis on rote learning, rather than solving problems and developing more flexible skills. And education systems are geared towards a public sector job market that is shrinking, and for entry to post-secondary education. Most don’t make it. And those who do emerge with skills that are largely irrelevant to the needs of employers.
  • Moreover, many Arab youth view their education systems not as a source of learning and opportunity, but as a vehicle through which autocratic rulers seek to limit critical thinking, undermine freedom of speech and reinforce their political control.
  • To a large extent, the protest movement across the Arab States has been led by educated youth and adults frustrated by political autocracy and limited economic opportunity. This has deflected attention from an education crisis facing low-income households in primary education – and from the needs of adolescents and youth emerging from school systems with just a few years of sub-standard education.
  • The Arab states have an unfinished agenda on basic education.  They still have 6 million primary school age children out of school – around 16% of the world’s total. Despite the vast gap in wealth between the two countries, Saudi Arabia has a lower primary school enrolment rate than Zambia. The Arab world also has some very large gender disparities: in Yemen, primary school enrolment rates are 79% for boys, but just 66% for girls.
  • Consider the case of Egypt. On average, someone aged 17-22 years old in the country has had around nine years of education. That’s roughly what might be anticipated on the basis of the country’s income. Scratch the surface, though, and you get a different picture: around 12% of Egyptians have had less than two years of education.
  • High dropout rates from primary and lower secondary school are symptomatic of parental poverty, poor quality education, and a sustained failure on the part of the Egyptian government to tackle the underlying causes of inequality. Adolescents from poor backgrounds entering labor markets without a secondary education are carrying a one-way ticket to a life of poverty, insecurity and marginalization.
  • The political crisis sweeping Arab states is the product of many years of political failure. The aspirations and hopes of young people – who are increasingly connected to each other and the outside world through the Internet – are colliding with an atrophied political system governed by complacent, self-interested elites who are disconnected from the population.
stephknox24

A Life Connected - 2 views

www.NonviolenceUnited.org

peace_education

shared by stephknox24 on 10 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • stephknox24 on 10 Mar 11
     
    The purpose of this website is to start a world revolution based on compassion and personal responsibility. Our vision is a world driven by the innate goodness of people and their values of justice, kindness, and compassion for other people, for the planet, and for animals.
Teachers Without Borders

Education brought to Amazon by internet "distance-learning" | memeburn - 0 views

memeburn.com/...-by-internet-distance-learning

Brazil education school internet students distance-learning

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 25 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • The internet has allowed a school to sprout in a remote area of the Amazon where teachers tend not to linger due to harsh living conditions and a scarcity of students. Teachers in Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, conduct lessons streamed to students in the village of Tumbira using an internet connection made possible with a generator-powered radio signal.
  • Tumbira classes take place in the afternoons and evenings, when the generator runs and there is power for the internet. Children intently watch teachers on flat-screen monitors equipped with Web cameras that let distant professors see students, peruse homework or follow exercises in classes.
  • Local teachers sit with students, answering questions and helping with assignments.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Homework is done at school, which features a library, internet and assisting teachers like dos Santos.
  • Students also work in vegetable gardens and learn about sustainably harvesting trees and working with wood. “The goal is to have students learn skills that they can take back to develop within their communities”, Garrido said. There are also computing and internet classes, with students required to maintain a “Passion for the Amazon” blog and upload digital photographs. Students boasted email and Facebook accounts. The school has support from FAS, along with a non-governmental organization devoted to keeping alive the stories and culture of Amazonian people.
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.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • 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

Ghazi High School Reopens with a New Look | ReliefWeb - 0 views

reliefweb.int/...454723

high school school schools Afghanistan education construction USAID

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 24 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • The Ghazi High School was established as a “Lycée” in 1926 and from the beginning, had instruction in English. After it was almost completely destroyed by decades of war, USAID began working with the Ministry of Education to rebuild the school.
  • Construction for the 8,200 square meter three-story school began in 2007 and includes buildings with 72 classrooms, an enclosed link way that connects the classroom blocks, and ramps for wheelchair access. The school was designed and constructed to international seismic safety standards to prevent damage from earthquakes.
  • USAID created the Kabul Schools Program to support the Ministry of Education’s ambitious plans to expand quality and access to education, and when the program finishes in 2012, the Ministry will have the capacity to serve the educational needs of more than 12,000 boys and girls in greater Kabul City.
  • Teachers Without Borders on 24 Oct 11
     
    KABUL, AFGHANISTAN | OCTOBER 23, 2011 - The newly constructed Ghazi High School was inaugurated today by both Afghan and U.S. government officials, including H.E. Minister of Education Ghulam Farooq Wardak and U.S. Deputy Ambassador James B. Cunningham. Funded through USAID's Kabul Schools Program, 5,400 students will be able to study in the rebuilt school.
Teachers Without Borders

UNESCO Uses Souktel Mobile Alerts System to Keep Gaza Schools and Students Safe - 0 views

app.e2ma.net/...9b82426f537d3c1f1d4e1cce4ff985

Souktel SMS mobile phones education schools Gaza

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 02 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • UNESCO staff in Gaza recruited Souktel to create an SMS alert/survey system that warns parents and their children of any danger happening near local schools. The service forms a key part of UNESCO’s Crisis and Disaster Risk Reduction project, which aims to ensure that schools are secure community spaces.
  • "In conflict zones, when it's not safe to leave your house to get information, mobile phones can bridge the gap and keep everyone connected," says Souktel co-founder Jacob Korenblum. "This basic technology allows aid workers, educators and local families to stay in contact at all times." 
  • Here’s how it works: At each school, principals and teachers are given password-protected access to a web interface, where they can send SMS alerts to all parents’ mobile phones. In an emergency, they could write, "Attack near school today, please keep your children at home." Once the violence has ended, another message could go out saying, "Shelling has stopped; please come to school this morning."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • So far, 29 schools have been targeted for this project, with more than 11,700 students benefitting from the service.
‹ Previous 21 - 33 of 33
Showing 20▼ items per page