EDUC561 Class

 

Educational media and technology is one of the most important courses you would ever take in your whole learning process, showing the ways that you would be able to combine between education and technology, to facilitate the teaching process and make it easier for both teacher and learner.

As the world goes on we as human beings should follow the track and be up to date, everything around us is technology, even in the schools, but we should know how to use it in the best way so we can benefit from it to the max, and the role of this course is to show us the best ways to control this technology by showing how to use important apps and important sites to make the learning process better.

Your opinion about integrating technology into teaching

 

The technology integration is using technological tools to facilitate and make the teaching and  learning process easier for both teacher and student, showing the how to use technological skills to maintain the best way of education. So we would have a lot of advantages by this integration.

There are a lot of ways to integrate technology in education and some of these ways are:

1- Using slides to make presentations for new lessons

2- Making sites for information

3- Combining education and fun using learning games

4- Creating groups to share knowledge between students

Applying this ways would have a lot of benefits such as:

1-     Students will be more engaged and included since we are working all together

2-     Students will be more productive and creative. Technology makes them to show their best by using new skills and funny apps

3-     Teachers will be able to know their students better and improve the relation between them, because of the communications that occur between these two.

 

Tools that can be used in online assessment

 

The online assessment is the most effective way to rate the students and evaluate them, to see what they learned and what the teacher have achieved with his learners. It is a new developed way of testing, better than the traditional way which is by giving exams and answers are written by hand, which makes the correction harder and not exact.

And some of the tools used in an online assessment are:

1-     Google forms: it is the best and easiest way to make an online exam. Teachers can ask questions or make MCQs to evaluate the learners, and answers with grades will be shown directly after submission, which facilitates and simples the correcting process

2-     Kahoot: is a very beautiful way of combining between gaming and education which makes students more happy by creating a challenging atmosphere since there is a time for answering and the fastest will be the winner

3-     Mentimeter: is a site that makes interaction between students by doing quizzes by voting, so teachers will be able to know who voted for the right answer and who didn’t and finally teachers can see the results as an Excel file.

4-     Wordwall: is the best way to revision what you have taught

5-     Poll everywhere: is also a site used to ask students some questions to know who answered correctly or to know statistics about some thing

6-     Google docs, sheets and slides: without any doubt these are the best tools for group working, and teachers will be able to know who wrote every letter in an assignment and the most ones who have worked on it.

How to be a digital citizen

The digital citizen is the person who uses technology and its tools in the best way to make his daily life better, by using technology in a very responsible and appropriate way.

Being a good citizen requires some strategies to be followed such as:

1-     Applying the golden rule: it is treating people the way you want to be treated, believing in the statement “what goes around comes around” (Karma) , so we should respect others and treat them in a nice lovely way then they will do so.

2-     Being real: in a world full of fake things, people are also trying to be fake to impress others or to achieve something they want. And being a good digital citizen requires real actions to reveal who we are, so people love us as us not as somebody else, since behind the screen is very different from what is in the world.

3-     Leaving something nice after we are gone:  every action you do will be shown to public one day so we should do things that shows who really we are, a things that makes the ones around us feel comfortable, and not using technology in a bad way so everyone would remember how good we were

4-     Helping everyone in need: sometimes we could have the ability to help someone with the things we have and if we did so we are improving our society and showing how good citizens we are

 

What do you think students should be taught when working online to avoid problems

 

As a teacher you are responsible for teaching students some rules that should be followed to avoid mistakes and problems such as:

1-     To be a good digital citizen following the rules mentioned before

2-     To separate between learning and things that might distract them while learning such as social media apps and games

3-     To manage between learning and having fun

4-     To be responsible while using technology

5-     To remember the main reason why they are here

Challenges you face when learning/teaching online

There are a lot of circumstances that might face a teacher and a learner at the same time. Some of these challenges are:

1-     Lack of electricity and internet because you are living in lebanon

2-     Lack of technological tools needed to be able to keep up to date and going on because not everyone have same financial ability

3-     The teacher is having a difficulty in delivering the information

4-     Keeping students on task and concentrated is so hard

5-     The time management for the sessions

6-     Students can cheat easily and communicate during exams

What can you do now that we were not able to do a year ago

 

From a year ago everything was different everybody was different, and after the pandemic everyone tried to learn something new to facilitate their daily life, and in these year I have learned many new skills and how to use new apps, especially after taking some new courses in TD , such as: I have learned how to use zoom and Google forms, in addition to using all Google apps such as Google docs and slides, in addition to that I have took important courses to improve my teaching skills such as philosophy of education and classroom dynamics, that made me manage my classes better and manage my students in an easy correct way by knowing their needs and abilities.

An exercise for the brain

 

When you run for an hour every day, your muscles will become stronger and better to give a high and good performance for your legs, even the brain should go under exercises to make it perform well, one of the most important exercises is the mental calculation. Making your brain do calculations without using a calculator would make it better, which increases your concentration, memorization, explanation and improves your skills. So this process should be a subject in the curriculum and should be taught to students starting from grade 3. This is not only a process to calculate difficult equations but also is a way of thinking and exercising even more than that.

Genius Map

 

Genius map is a company that teaches the soroban and mantel calculation skilled abacus operators report visualizing a mental image of the abacus and calculating any mathematical operations even the advanced ones such as multiplication, division and powers. This process is not only for calculating such equations, it is also for developing the brain of the student. And an experiment done by experts showed that:” the abacus training has both quantitative and qualitative on children’s mental skills(Stigler,1984). It was established in 2009 in Beirut Lebanon by the doctor Hade Hamza having branches in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, China, Japan and in many countries around the world.

It is a member in ISDF (international soroban diffusion foundation) and cooperation agreement with (shin soroban gakushuugukku).

We are offering a discount for all official schools, since we believe in the abilities of our children.

A student who woke up from 6 am then travelling for an hour in the bus from home to school followed by 6 to 7 hours learning, and another hour to return home, makes him feel tired and anxious. Also students are mostly depending on their calculators to solve mathematical calculations even though these calculations are easy. Furthermore, our students are challenged by their own school friends and not by other students from other schools and maybe countries. And the most important problem is that the student is not prepared to think logically, he is only like a receiver who memorizes the information.

Entering genius MAP process to schools, two hours per week to all classes have many benefits on students. This process is maintained through giving student’s books according to their age and classifying them into levels and teaching them how to calculate equations on the sorban. Following many steps as starting from teaching students how to calculate using sorban then how to imagine these sorban and calculate mental and starting from calculating easy calculations reaching the advanced ones.

A student is not a robot so high pressure effects his health and brain development, so our process is like a medicine. And after few months the student would be able to abandons the calculator by 80 %. After one year students are able to challenge students from other schools and even countries. Our process is changing the student from a memorizer and a receiver to a person who thinks logically and finds solutions for many problems.

We started our work in 2007, in only one year we achieve our first goal which is 1000 students, then this number have increased strictly till reaching 25000 students in this year 2019. Many schools have entered our project to their curriculum and they found that their students become better and smarter. The first impressive achievement was making the first competition in Lebanon in 2012 such as 500 students were participating, after that every year the number of students increase till reaching 2512 competitor in the competition in 2017 breaking the world highest record of number of competitors participating in a one day sorban competition reached by china of number 2300 student, so we have entered the Guinness book. From 2011 till now we are participating in both international competitions WAAMA and PAMA and getting the first prizes in each year.