Skip to main content

Home/ Teachers Without Borders/ Group items tagged m-learning

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Teachers Without Borders

Collaborate Smart: Practical Strategies and Tools for Educators | CEC Store - 1 views

  •  
    From Susan M. Hentz, noted educational speaker and author of Teach Smart, and Phyllis M. Jones, a teacher administrator and educator; Collaborate Smart: Practical Strategies and Tools for Educators is a masterful tool for improving co-teaching and collaborative communication among members of teaching teams. The evolving process of collaboration in the classroom involves negotiation, re-negotiation, respect, trust, and the creation of a level of comfort in the partnership that allows for risk taking in thinking and practice, which yields cohesive instruction that best impacts a student's learning experience. A "how-to" guide for every educator, Collaborate Smart enhances your resources for instruction through its fully developed, comprehensive yet practical information.
Teachers Without Borders

South Korea: Kids, Stop Studying So Hard! - TIME - 0 views

  • On a wet Wednesday evening in Seoul, six government employees gather at the office to prepare for a late-night patrol. The mission is as simple as it is counterintuitive: to find children who are studying after 10 p.m. And stop them. In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country's addiction to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties to turn in violators.
  • South Korea's hagwon crackdown is one part of a larger quest to tame the country's culture of educational masochism. At the national and local levels, politicians are changing school testing and university admissions policies to reduce student stress and reward softer qualities like creativity. "One-size-fits-all, government-led uniform curriculums and an education system that is locked only onto the college-entrance examination are not acceptable," President Lee Myung-bak vowed at his inauguration in 2008.
  • There are more private instructors in South Korea than there are schoolteachers, and the most popular of them make millions of dollars a year from online and in-person classes. When Singapore's Education Minister was asked last year about his nation's reliance on private tutoring, he found one reason for hope: "We're not as bad as the Koreans."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • South Koreans are not alone in their discontent. Across Asia, reformers are pushing to make schools more "American" — even as some U.S. reformers render their own schools more "Asian." In China, universities have begun fashioning new entry tests to target students with talents beyond book learning. And Taiwanese officials recently announced that kids will no longer have to take high-stress exams to get into high school. If South Korea, the apogee of extreme education, gets its reforms right, it could be a model for other societies.
  • The problem is not that South Korean kids aren't learning enough or working hard enough; it's that they aren't working smart. When I visited some schools, I saw classrooms in which a third of the students slept while the teacher continued lecturing, seemingly unfazed. Gift stores sell special pillows that slip over your forearm to make desktop napping more comfortable. This way, goes the backward logic, you can sleep in class — and stay up late studying. By way of comparison, consider Finland, the only European country to routinely perform as well as South Korea on the test for 15-year-olds conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. In Finland, public and private spending combined is less per pupil than in South Korea, and only 13% of Finnish students take remedial after-school lessons.
Teachers Without Borders

As turmoil continues, children remain out of school in Côte d'Ivoire | Back o... - 0 views

  • “We arrived at school at 7:30 a.m. as we always do on a school day. At exactly 8:30 we could hear shooting coming from the direction of a neighbouring village,” recalls Pafait Guei, a 14-year-old boy in sixth grade, who usually attends Beoua village primary school in western Côte d’Ivoire.
  • Pafait and his friends have not been in school since that day, on 17 March. Côte d’Ivoire has been through political crisis and violence following disputed presidential elections last year. Although the political deadlock has been resolved with the new President, Alassane Outtara, sworn in, there is still a tremendous push required to restore the volatile situation in the country.
  • UNICEF, with the support of the Government of Côte d’Ivoire and its partners, has been targeting one million children for the national ‘Back to School’ campaign in the 10 most vulnerable regions in the western and southern parts of the country.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “I don’t know when school will start. I know that it’s not good for me to be sitting at home, but none of the teachers have returned to Beoua as their homes are still occupied by the military,” says Pafait.
  • Several schools in western Côte d’Ivoire remain closed, due to the occupying of teachers homes and, in some cases, school buildings by the armed forces. UNICEF is currently actively engaged in negotiations with the Government of Côte d’Ivoire to get the occupied homes and buildings vacated immediately.
  • Learning in a safe and protective environment is crucial for a child. One of UNICEF’s main challenges here remains access to education for the most vulnerable children in the conflict-affected areas because of insecurity.
1 - 4 of 4
Showing 20 items per page