The United Nations Children's Fund (or UNICEF) has partnered with Dubai Cares to improve the quality of education in children. The move is a part of Dubai Cares to bring education to one million children in need and help contribute towards Millennium Development Goal 2
Cambodian Education Ministry brings open source into education
The Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport has launched its new ICT Textbook for schools that have computers, all universities and all teacher training facilities. The new textbook also teaches the use of Khmer language Free and Open Source applications, like OpenOffice, Mekhala (Firefox) and Moyura (Thunderbird), which have been fully translated to Khmer language (Cambodian).
The new textbook follows interactive training of eight month during which all new upper secondary school ICT teachers, all ICT teachers at upper secondary schools that have computers, and all ICT Master Trainers from teacher training facilities have been trained to teach this type of software, as well as to maintain their computer facilities. The Ministry will distribute the books together with a letter from the Ministry indicating that from now on this should be the materials to be taught. Thus Cambodia becomes the first country in the world to fully change its education system to only teach Free and Open Source applications. Computers in Khmer language is available only through Free and Open Source software; separates the skill of “second-language” from the skill of “computer use”, allowing students to work on them independently, and even use their computer skills to later use computers to learn English.
OLPC, IDB to launch pilot project in Haiti
The One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC) has teamed up with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to launch a pilot project in Haiti.
Under this partnership, the project aims to contribute XO laptops to 13,200 students and 500 teachers in 60 Haitian primary schools. The Haitian government is hoping that the use of laptops will speed up the learning process for students, who enter school late or have to repeat grades. Both organisations are financing the projects to test whether the use of laptops in schools on a one-to-one basis can improve teaching and learning in Haiti. One aim of the project is to determine how the laptops can be used to help solve problems such as a shortage of qualified teachers, as well as educating children of different ages and grades in the same classroom. The project will be evaluated by UNESCO's Regional Office on Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, which will conduct standardised math and language tests before and after the pilot project to determine performance improvements.
Oracle to train teachers in North-East region of India
Oracle Education Foundation is bringing education and cyber world to the doorstep of students, who are residing in the interior of North East through its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) venture, think.com.
Think.com is a protected online community where students can share educational content, collaborate on projects, interact with teachers and build knowledge. Oracle has organised a two-day training camp for 52 teachers from 26 different schools of the region in Guwahati. The training camps are aimed to allow teachers to try their hands at numerous cyber applications and introducing them to the nuances of cyber world and e-Learning. The teachers are in turn expected to introduce the concept of e-Learning among the students in the schools. Around 70 schools and 3,000 students have already registered themselves with think.com from North East. The programme is under collaboration between Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan in India and presently has more than 1.5 lakh users in the country.
HP Enters Education Arena
HPLS is a strategic initiative to leap into the education market aimed at becoming a one-stop-solution for all information communication and technology (ICT) needs of a school. This will include hardware, software, networking, training, maintenance and financing solution through one window.
HP India is rolling out its system in 20 cities across the country, targeting private schools in these 20 cities during the first phase, which will be completed by March this year. The second phase, starting June, will see HPLS being rolled out in tier-2 cities.
HPLS will primarily dwell on two broad areas in schools
Russian Children Top International Reading Literacy Study
The publication of a major international comparison of reading among ten-year-olds which showed that England had fallen from third to fifteenth position in the past five years. Scotland fell from fourteenth to twenty-first place in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, run by Boston College in Massachusetts. Russian children came top in the study.< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
As the study measures comparative performance of reading among 4,000 10-year-olds in 40 countries, there is no evidence that reading standards have fallen in England, only that other countries have caught up and overtaken English children.
The study did show, however, that English ten-year-olds were now reading less at home than they did five years ago. The fall was particularly high among the highest-achieving children. The literacy report for England, produced for the Government by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), found that 22 % of English children spent five hours or more playing computer or video games on a normal school day, with 37 % spending more than three hours. This was exceeded only by the US and seven other countries. Although the report concluded that time playing computer games was linked to poor results in the tests, it did not say how. There are no direct comparisons between 2001 and 2006 for computer-game playing.
The report did find, however, that the proportion of teachers in England failing to set reading homework had risen from 4 to 11 % in the past 5 years. The proportion of teachers devoting more than 3 hours a week to teaching reading fell from 88 to 80 per cent.
The report also found a clear association between the number of books at home and reading attainment. The 23 % of children with 200 or more books at home had significantly higher reading scores than the ten % with ten or fewer books. The proportion of children who never read outside school had increased significantly since 2001.
NIIT & Cisco Partner to Enhance Talent
NEW DELHI: Cisco, global leader in networking and infrastructure management, and NIIT, leading global IT corporation, have agreed to develop and enhance the IT infrastructure management talent pool in the Asia Pacific region.
According to the agreement, NIIT will offer training programmes on Cisco's latest tools and technologies in the networking and infrastructure management space across NIIT's select IT education centres in the Asia Pacific region. NIIT will provide training on Cisco's authorised curriculum and enable Cisco certification for students aspiring to build careers as networking professionals and system engineers.
Internet in Hindi & Regional Languages Soon
Imagine writing an email in urdu, using urdu script, an urdu email id within an urdu domain and receiving a reply in hindi, with a hindi e-mail id, hindi domain, etc! Due to the various scripts and languages used in India, plus the fact that many of them have very similar characters (22 official languages involving 12 different scripts), development of IDNs of India's .IN domain is being worked on by Afilias in consultation with Government organisations such as, Department of Information Technology, NIXI, CDAC and ICANN. From the Government's side, issues such as maintaining the sovereignty (such as linking domains such as .BHARAT with .IN); elimination of security threats such as cyber terrorism, and of course, access to the internet in regional languages are top priority.
When you type in a URL (currently in English), your computer communicates with the ISP Provider, who in turn communicates with a root name server, which authenticates your IP address and the URL text. The last suffix of the URL is known as a Top Level Domain (TLD). TLDs include extensions such as .gov, .com, .in, .med, .mobi and .org.< ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Due to technical limitations, top level domain (TLD) names can only be registered in ASCII characters. International characters such as those written in Hindi (Devnagari-based) cannot be interpreted by the DNS, and therefore cannot reside in a domain name registry as a registered name.
Bi-lingual keyboards, instant messaging or chat or mobile phone text messages (SMS) are some aspects of ICT that have already started moving towards non-English formats. However, in the case of e-mails, specialised setups are required. Also, while the text may contain native language characters, the e-mail addresses themselves are not.
24X7 Education TV Channel Launched
A niche channel targeting a specific audience and advertisers, Topper is a 24×7 education channel that was launched earlier this week, joining the ranks of other niche channels like NDTV Good Times and Real Estate TV. Media analysts say that a niche channel needs about Rs 30-35 crore as cost of operations in the first year and its specific target advertisers enables it to break even faster. < ?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Topper follows the same strategy. It will primarily focus on the Central Board of Secondary Examination (CBSE) curriculum for Classes 9-12. With test signals slated to begin on Monday and the new channel would go on air from the middle of this week. The channel will initially be available free on direct-to-home platforms like Tata Sky and Dish TV.
Promoted by Greycells 18 Media Private Limited, Topper is a joint venture created by Sunil Khanna, former chief executive officer, Dish TV, Sricharan Iyengar, former vice-president and business head ESPN Star Sports, Network 18 and Educomp. Initially, the content at the secondary level (Classes 9-10) will be for science and mathematics and at the senior level (Classes 11-12) for physics, chemistry and mathematics. The content will be accessible in different mediums like television and internet. Being a curriculum based learning system, students can also take tests online
Online Tutoring Emerges Under Exam Fever
Increasing access to the Internet in Indian cities has lead to several online tutorial companies mushrooming just before the Board examinations begin. Offering ready-made subject notes, online mock tests, and live tutorials, most of these were launched about three months back. Students can take classes in a group or take individual lessons as is on offer from Learning Hour, one of the portals offering online tutoring.
So basically, instead of going to a regular Master JEE for tuitions in the evening, you could log online and attend a Mathematics class. This is a paid service ranging from about Rs 200 per hour for an individual lesson in Mathematics if you are a Class X student.
