Fasial Public School and Sharing Awareness starts learning project in Multan, Pakistan
Project description:
To develop projects on the ground together with Fasial Public Schools. Direct action is supposed to be given to two schools and their teachers. The goal is to strengthen teachers in their pedagogy and subject knowledge

Dengue fever has been increasingly becoming an epidemic in Pakistan. Due to the high cost of treatment, the disease spread more rapidly in 2011 than in previous years. As of November 2011, it has killed over 300 people in the last several months and over 14,000 are infected by this mosquito born disease in Pakistan. Considering the threats of this fever, Faisal Public school organized a campaign and seminar at school to make children aware about the possible precautions and locally available solutions to get cure against this disease. Children were exposed to different educational materials, practices, solutions and preventive methodologies against dengue fever. Children took part in this campaign by reading materials about locally available solutions, writing stories, poems and by performing in a play about telling the stories of possible solutions. This interesting movie is partly in English and Urdu and written by school children. The movie directed by Mr. Babar Maqbool Khan with the help of children.
Mr. Khan is working as school head and has been a student of MKFC In-Service Teacher Training during 2009-2011.

The opportunities in the digital arena keep developing and creating business, entertainment, political turmoil and unparalleled opportunities for the ones in the know. During two action-packed days SIME Stockholm will be your guide into new insights, concrete business opportunities, tools and the smartest brains from the international digital arena.

12-year old Puck – founder of Puckipedia – was one of the many draws at SIME 2011: “12 year old wiz kid on stage: I can see people in their 30s looking uncomfortable – including myself (picture and text from the SIME blog)!

Two days of learning

The seminars was about the latest news how ICT and business develop with international perspectives. The business experts pointed out the importance that NGO take more responsibility to learn more about the business part of financing NGO work. It’s important to have a plan how to cooperate with companies. Companies stressed that it’s important that the NGO:s have clear strategies, plans and not only to focus on to collect money but rather do the work there experts in – to make the world a better place.

It becomes more and more important for NGOs to be social online and to be up to date with what business and ICT development . This is important to do better and clearer marketing and be more visible.

Representatives from the business said that many leaders in businesses still don’t want to relearn and be active with their employees and customers online. They let this over to the communication department in their companies rather then make it as an integrated part of the way of companies work. In some extent we think this was true for the non profit discussions. Much emphasise was on using ICT to collect money and marketing for the NGOs but less on how to make the organization more effective with the use of ICT.

The founder for Skype told about the importance of creating a team with passion and different competences. To dare to be curious, search for solutions and dare to receive feedback from customers, which was something he thought was important to make the business better. Customers today want to have access and right to create solutions so the services can be better and more effective.

NY times, Al-Jazeera and BBC team told about the importance of communicate and integrate social media and ICT tools in their productions. To communicate through peoples interest in their subject or journalism, was something that opens the doors to broader journalism. The role of TV needs to be more adapted after the consumers needs. Most people today look at content on their “second screen”. It was a lot of humour in Al-Jazeera and at the same time there is news in it! Integrate humour with facts! It can also stimulate learning!

Games and learning

It was sessions about games for different age groups and different purposes. Many marketers was intreseted in Gamification to engage their audience, some thought this was just a buzz word and other thought it’s the future of commercials. Gaming is also interesting for learning, most games are not directed for learning but games as SIMS and World of Warcraft has a deep dimension of learning. There was also new examples of games directed to girls 8-15 years which is a quite new age group for online games, a company had built about a horse game similar to World of Warcraft that they called World of Horsecraft. In this game the players can interact with other players/girls who play all over the world ! The games has a fantastic potential in the globalization in education!

The days gave updates on what is going on in the ICT world. We see that we already are working on these fields. It was interesting to learn about what is going on in the business, NGO and their connections to ICT!

Read more about the conference on the SIME blog

1. Teacher as Instructor: The teacher as instructor leads a group of learners, teaches those learners the subject on their level and activates their learning.
2. Teacher as Coach: The teacher as coach organizes and facilitates a safe and motivating learning environment and promotes learning taking account of personal and cultural differences of learners based on psychological insights.
3. Teacher as Developer: The teacher as developer develops and evaluates learning environments in the broadest sense with regard to personal and cultural differences between learners.
4. Teacher as Researcher: The teacher is the bridge between the scientific field of his subject and the learner and is able to introduce learners into research approaches. He identifies critical situation in his class or school, analyzes the core of this situation, with reference to research literature, and presents the results and evidence based recommendations to colleagues and other stakeholders. He is a critical consumer of relevant research literature.

Entrance role
Teacher as instructor is an entrance role for all three other roles.
The other three roles can be done independently from each other.

Seven elements
Each role has a structure consisting of seven elements: cultural, general courses, subject didactics, practice, research, reflection and an elective part.

Integration of theory and practice
Specially stress lays on integration of theory and practice: What is done during practice should be used somehow during the activities at the institution and what is done at the institution should be reflected somehow during the activities in the school.

1. “Instructor” Role description
The teacher as instructor is leads a group of learners, teaches those learners the subject on their level and activates their learning.
Aim
The aim is to provide student teachers with knowledge, skills and tools for the role of instructor and to prepare them for the other three blocks, including being able to go abroad.

2. “Coach” Role description
The teacher as coach organizes and facilitates a safe and motivating learning environment and promotes learning taking account of personal and cultural differences of learners based on psychological insights.
Aim
The aim is to prepare student teachers for the coach role and to stimulate student teachers to become aware of their own expertise and to cooperate with other experts when necessary.

3. “Developer” Role description
The teacher as developer develops and evaluates learning environments in the broadest sense with regard to personal and cultural differences between learners.
Aim
To prepare student teachers for the developer role, to learn from the evaluation and critics of colleagues and develops his own learning plan on base of this evaluation and critics and to become responsible for their own personal professional development.

4. “Researcher” Role description
The teacher is the bridge between the scientific field of his subject and the learner and is able to introduce learners into research approaches. He identifies critical situation in his class or school, analyzes the core of this situation, with reference to research literature, and presents the results andAim
evidence based recommendations to colleagues and other stakeholders. He is a critical consumer of relevant research literature.
Aim
To prepare student teachers to undertake the researcher role, be able to cooperate in a research team, to understand the relevance of research as an important part of their role , to take account of ethical aspects of research

Marja-Riitta Ritanoro, CEO, MKFC Stockholm College

MKFC Stockholm College long time partner , the founder of the ENO Programme, Mika Vanhanen, received The State Award for Public Information today. It was given to him by the minister of education and science, Mr Jukka Gustafsson in the Government Banquet Hall in Helsinki, Finland.

The Committee for Public Information states: “Mika Vanhanen founded and coordinates Environment Online – ENO, a global web school and network that runs in 150 countries amd covers 7 000 schools. It involves hundreds of thousands of students, and the network is spreading.

Read more on Stockholm College website

More than 2000 people are dying every day in Somalia, in a famine that threatens to starve more than eleven million people to death. Conflict between Somalia’s Al-Shabaab regime and world leaders has kept out aid that could end the famine. But a few key countries have the power to broker a deal to stop the suffering. Sign the urgent petition for a humanitarian truce and forward to everyone.

Next step is to build of the society and infrastructure. The second Millennium Development Goal stipulates that all children, boys and girls alike, should be able to complete a full course of primary schooling by 2015.

Children living in countries affected by conflict are more likely not to be attending school. This is evident in Somalia, where opportunities for education are unavailable for the majority of children. Reliable data is hard to find, but UNICEF estimates that Somalia has a 19.9 per cent gross enrolment ratio (GER), thus representing one of the lowest primary school enrolment rates in the world. Gender disparities in access to education remain a big problem, and female teachers are under-represented.

Sharing Awareness is dedicated to help achieving this goal in Somalia – help us doing this by donate to more teachers today!

E-learning offers a number of advantages: it is cost-effective, highly flexible and adaptable, and offers great possibilities for sharing knowledge both locally and globally. Our method is based on a mutual exhange of ideas and experiences, not a simple one-way transfer of skills and knowledge. By working online, the unqualified teachers that we train can continue their regular teaching while they’re taking the course, which is a great benefit for the teachers as well as their students. We are dedicated to making the quality of education count

Read how Sharing Awareness reached this goals in our first year.

Mr. Usman is working as a jounrnalist and lecturer in Multan, Pakistan. He is taking Social Media and Journalism course with MKFC Education Finder Sweden. In his third assignment, he was suppose to work practically on different social media tools including twitter, wiki, blog and bambuser and reflect that how these tools can be potentially use in his local environment. In this bambuser report Usman talks about the use of mobile technologies in journalist profession. Usman can be reached through his twitter at usmanrazi.

Different pedagogical methods can be identified to help and stimulate learning among children. Online tutorial and hand on activities can help to enhance mathematics understanding conceptually and logically which consequently encourage learners to become mathematical thinkers.

Read more: Dawn

Picture courtesy: Grand Island