Dengue Fever Awareness Campaign by Faisal Public School Multan, Pakistan

Posted on | November 29, 2011 | No Comments

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.

Teacher’s Role

Posted on | November 9, 2011 | No Comments

Curriculum for teachers’ pedagogical studies
The curriculum is divided in four blocks of 15 ECTS each. Each block has a specific theme, according to the roles of teachers.

Teacher as Instructor: The teacher as instructor leads a group of learners, teaches those learners the subject on their level and activates their learning.
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.
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.
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

Category: Teacher training

MKFC collaborator receives the state award for Public Information for a better enviroment

Posted on | October 11, 2011 | No Comments

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.

My students don’t hate maths anymore

Posted on | April 26, 2011 | No Comments

Things become difficult for most of the learners when it comes to math. Left-brainers usually love math and right-brainers usually find it challenging. For the teachers most important thing is how to trigger the motivation and interest in Math among the learners. To do this, very first thing is teacher’s attitude towards the subject and learners. Teacher’s positive attitude towards Math and its potential application in reality can enhance the learner’s interest. Students learn more from their surroundings and by interaction with their environment. Usually, students want to imagine and construct pictures of real life situation in their mind. Zeeshan Paul, a lecturer in Pakistan quotes Judy Willis in his article, she is a middle and elementary school teacher and a former neurologist, in her latest book Learning to Love Math examines strategies for building math “positivity” in students. She states, “Before children can become interested in math, they have to be comfortable with it. Students build resilience and coping strategies when they learn how to use their academic strengths to build math skills and strategies. A teacher’s intervention helps them strengthen the networks that carry information through their brains’ emotional filters to the area where higherorder thinking skills are concentrated, the prefrontal cortex (PFC). With practice, they will be able to use the highest-level analytical networks in the PFC to evaluate incoming information and discover creative solutions to maths problems.” Second, a maths teacher must find ways to strengthen the cognitive processes required to compute maths problems because what looks like a struggle with maths may actually be a deficiency in the underlying cognitive processes. Mel Levine, author of A Mind at a Time and other books on learning differences, identifies many of the brain’s processes that math requires. Broyles and Pittard, faculty of The Howard School, applied Mel Levine’s model for the teaching of long division and verified the usability of the model. They found that in order to solve a long division problem a student must remember and complete more than 20 steps which require sustained attention to the process — procedural recall, language processing, detailed paper organization, scattered visual tracking, and a strong working memory. Third, while teaching a maths problem a maths teacher must keep the following additional points in mind: • Distinguish between skill in computation and skill in mathematical thinking: Many students who struggle with pencil and paper computation are strong spatial thinkers and mathematical problem solvers.

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.

Mapping the learners talent

Posted on | April 19, 2011 | 1 Comment

Creatures game

Every child and young person has talents (interest, hobbies, ideas and other)! In this week teachers were suppose to map learners talents. They made interviews with the teachers, children. After reading the Howard Gardeners theory of Multiple Intelligences teachers need to implement in their authentic learning environment. Above are the learners work. One of our teacher training student, Noshin has involved her learners in creating a creature game. First I play the creature game with my learners and then give them options and allow them to do as according to their choice.

This can be done with as few as 4 people or as many as you want. Everyone starts with a blank sheet of paper and a pen, pencil, marker or crayon. Each person draws a head on their own sheet. There are no rules. You can draw the head of a person, animal, even an alien. The limit is the imagination of the one holding the writing instrument. After the head has been drawn, fold the paper over so only the bottom of the neck is visible. Now, everyone needs to pass their paper to the right. The next thing you draw is the chest and top of the arms. Then fold and pass to the right again. Now you can add hands and a waist fold and pass, now the legs, fold and pass and lastly the feet. Once the entire body has been drawn you can unfold the paper and see what interesting creatures have been created. This is a lot of fun in a mid-sized group of school age kids. It’s also an excellent ice-breaker activity because it encourages interaction between everyone but not in an embarrassing way like some of the icebreaker type games can. It is good practice to expose your child to a wide range of interests. Allow her to take part in different activities. A preschooler may not know yet, what she likes. Talents may not make themselves visible during the early years of child’s life. So It is important that you let her explore different things, she will be naturally drawn to activities she prefer. Take her to museum, sports, or cultural events. At home involve her in household chores or toss a ball around with her. However as she grows older avoid putting her in too many extracurricular activities and let her concentrate on those where she has shown true excellence and advanced ability. One of the most important goals of teachers and parents should be to find areas in which a child might experience mastery.

Category: Teacher training
Tags: Creature > Game > Mapping > Talents

Sesame Street: to enhance learning inclusion in Pakistan

Posted on | April 12, 2011 | No Comments

Sesame Street

To include the children those who have no access to formal education in Pakistan through famous TV show Sesame Street , USAID is funding a $20 m project to develop Sesame Street TV show in Urdu. The show is to be filmed at the street of Lahore and in the villages with roadside tea shop and residents sitting on their verandas. Hopefully, people can watch it in the end of this year. The remake will star a puppet called Rani, the six-year-old daughter of a peasant farmer, with pigtails and a school uniform, according to Britain’s Guardian newspaper. This program will target mainly 5-9 year old children and will be aired on Pakistan national TV and other regional languages channels.
“The programme is part of a series of ventures that is aimed at developing the educational infrastructure in the country,” Virginia Morgan, a spokesperson for USAID, told the BBC.
“Education is one of the vital sectors that need help in Pakistan.”
The Rafi Peer theatre group is responsible for the production of local version in collaboration with Sesame Street workshop. Imran Peerzada, a writer for the new series, said the protagonist was a brave and daring girl. He said, “She will represent what little girls have to go through in this gender-biased society,”
He said her journey would inevitably touch on Pakistan’s ongoing fight with militancy, but would not directly refer to religion.

“We don’t want to label children‚” he said. “The basic learning tools of literacy‚ numeracy‚ hygiene‚ and healthy eating have to be in place first.”

This represents the importance of digital media and its potential implication on the inclusion. Due to massive accessibility of TV throughout the country and immense interest of youth in this particular kind of TV shows, one can easily presume about its popularity when it will be aired.

Category: e Learning in Pakistan
Tags: Education > Inclusion > Lahore > Pakistan > Rani > Sesame Street > USAID

Storyboard: The Apple Bird

Posted on | April 5, 2011 | No Comments

The Apple Bird

Noshin is MKFC Teacher Training student from Pakistan. She is working as kindergarten teacher. During Teacher Training week 8, she suppose to work on storyboard and its potential use in the local learning environment. She thinks that being a kindergarten teacher, she needs to develop learner’s basic skills and social behavior by games, exercises, music, and simple handicrafts. Here, she reflects her experience that how her learner love to listen ”The Apple Bird” story from her.

Stories and poems that have a familiar structure can create a supportive context for learning about the writing process, building students’ background knowledge, and scaffolding their creation of original stories. My learner love The Apple Bird story and most of the time they ask me to read this story for them. After reading material about storyboard from Google and other links I feel the best story for this activity must be: a simple, well-rounded plot, a clear beginning, middle, and end, an underlying theme, a small number of well-defined characters, dialogue, repetition, colorful language or catchphrases

Educate Teachers for Every Child

Inservice Teacher Training

Dengue Fever Awareness Campaign by Faisal Public School Multan, Pakistan

Teacher’s Role

MKFC collaborator receives the state award for Public Information for a better enviroment

My students don’t hate maths anymore

Mapping the learners talent

Sesame Street: to enhance learning inclusion in Pakistan

Storyboard: The Apple Bird

Translation

MKFC Stockholm College

Stockholm College Feed

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