Lessons in Well Drilling Spill into the Classroom A project to bring clean water to residents of Namawanga, Kenya, serves as an example in lesson plans for middle-school students. Update Nov. 12, 2012: Curricula videos now on YouTube, see belowSince 2006, student engineers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have teamed with residents of Namawanga, Kenya, to clean the town's drinking water – and teach U.S. students in more than 100 middle and high schools math, science, and social studies. Pastures flank the town's streams and tests detected e.coli in the water. To solve the problem, the residents and students in Engineers Without Borders at UMass are drilling a well and building spring boxes around the water source to protect it from contamination. At the same time, the UMass project is meshed with a multi-disciplinary curriculum for middle and high schools. The lessons spin off from an EWB video documentary about clean water for Kenyans. Virtual engineering Issues in water treatment is one of three curricula.
Math Training Initiative Innovative Math Training Initiative Ground breaking Math initiative educating underprivileged children in slum and village communities via The Khan Academy teaching modules! Research shows that math learning is a vital component in children’s long-term educational development and ability to get a self-sustaining job after school. A proper math education in India enables a child to be streamlined into a normative high school and ultimately into the mainstream workforce. Unfortunately, access to the good math training is rare in India and teaching math in the slums and remote villages is difficult for many logistic reasons. The Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org), an innovative e-learning solution sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Google Company, provides accessible math modules on the internet in order to enable an child anywhere to obtain a free world-class education. The modules will have an even broader impact.
The Sow It Forward Garden Grants Program Our application process for 2014 grants is now closed but we are accepting applications throughout 2014 for our 2015 grant cycle. The application deadline for our 2015 grant cycle is 5pm Eastern Time, Friday January 9, 2015. Sow It Forward is the grants and partnership program of Kitchen Gardeners International. The grant is for nonprofit causes or organizations (schools, 501c3s, food banks, community gardens, colleges, libraries, prisons, senior programs, etc.) interested in starting or expanding food garden projects that are of general benefit to their community. Past grantees include school gardens, community gardens, food bank gardens, library gardens, senior gardens, prison gardens and homeless shelter gardens among others. For our 2014 round of giving, we offered 100 full grants and roughly 60 partial grants. The partial grant had a value of $325 and consisted of a $300 cash grant and $25 one-year subscription to our online garden planner.
Indian schools adopt tablets. Will they improve education? Richard Mahapatra, a 42-year-old journalist, recently attended a parent-teacher meeting at his daughter’s private school in Delhi. During the meeting, he said, teachers encouraged him to buy a tablet. The school was selling several tablets made by HCL, a leading Indian technology company, for about 6,000 rupees, or $120. Some parents, Mahapatra said, bought the tablets. But the journalist found the whole situation uncomfortable: First, he didn’t like the idea of schools promoting a private company’s tablet, and second, he wasn’t sure how it would benefit his daughter. “For a father like me, it’s not a cultural change but almost like a genetic jump,” he said, recalling that he began his education with chalk and slate at a small tribal school in the state of Orissa on the eastern coast of India. Over the last 15 years, a growing number of Indian schools have been upgrading their technology to include state-of the-art computers accessible to all students. Prasanto K.
Innovation in Education Introduction Education is the crucible in which Innovations are forged. Promoting creativity and incentivizing innovations through our educational institutions is a first step towards broadening and deepening the impact of innovations in our society and economy. In large scale education systems such as ours, catering to a vast population with relatively limited resources, this is a major challenge. (a) Creation of a separate scholarship stream of National Innovation Scholarships analogous to the National Talent Search Scheme. (b) Setting up an Innovation Centre in each DIET (District Institute of Education and Training) to enhance teacher training and enable them to become facilitators of creativity and innovative thinking. (c) Mapping of Local History, Ecology and Cultural Heritage by each High School in the country to create critical thinking on their local environment by students. (f) Setting up twenty Design Innovation Centres co-located in institutes of national importance.
History and Philosophy of Science, Cognitive Science and Science Education: Issues at the Interface Kala L.1 and Jayashree Ramadas Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education V.N.Purav Marg, Mankhurd, Mumbai 400 088. Science education of the sixties was dominated by curriculum reform movements. These movements, originating in the USA and UK, were inspired politically by the launching of Sputnik. Early research in education was pervaded by behaviorist notions of learning. From Piaget's perspective, cognition is an adaptive function. Piaget's constructivism led to a transition in the conception of learning as an active process that took into account the learner's interaction with the environment. By this time, curricula developed in the US and UK were facing stringent criticism from the philosophy of science quarters. [#! The justification for applying ideas from the philosophy of science to science education, could be found in the `child-as-a-scientist' metaphor, which had been subtly present since Piaget. Lakatosian notion [#!
The Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (This section was last updated in February 2014). SECMOL welcomes volunteers, their work and the inter-cultural exchange and understanding they bring. Conversation class If you are interested in volunteering for SECMOL, contact the volunteer coordinator, at this email address. Volunteers should stay for a minimum of three weeks at SECMOL. Due to visiting groups, we will not need any more general volunteers from 10 May through mid-August, 2014. The biggest need is in December and February for our youth camps, where no special skills are needed, and since it is not tourist season we often get fewer volunteers than we want at that time. Rough volunteering calendar for 2014 April-May-June 2014: Several volunteers with teaching experience or training are already expected, so we won't need many other general volunteers. 10 May to mid-August: Big visiting groups mean we can't accommodate any additional volunteers. Sept - Dec 2014: General friendly volunteers welcome again. [Back to Top] Youth Camps
Arvind Gupta's interview in Citadel Universities join hands to reach out to rural youth The Central University of Tamil Nadu (CUTN) at Thiruvarur and Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) have tied up to offer agriculture-related short-term courses to farmers, who have not finished school, to give them an opportunity to equip themselves with the latest in farm technology. These courses will be offered in the community college mode at the CUTN. A memorandum to this effect was inked by B.P. Sanjay, Vice-Chancellor of CUTN, and K. Talking to The Hindu over phone, Mr. “This is a way for universities to reach out to rural youth and those who have not completed formal education. The university is expecting to admit some 30 students in each batch, depending on the demand.
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