Traditional Classroom

Modern Classroom

  The life changes so fast and develops from time to time, as well as in education and learning. Learning had been evolving until today and will continue to grow in the future. According to reasercher S.Nasution, until now there are three models of learning that often confused by the means of  "teaching". First, teaching is imparting knowledge to the students with the aim to be mastered by the learners. This first type considered to be succesful is when the students mastered all the pieces of knowledge as much as possible that had been transferred by the teachers. Second, teaching is to convey the culture to the learners. This type is almost the same with the first that emphasize to the teacher as a more active part, and the student isn't more than a baby with the spoonfeed education. Third, teaching is an activity to organize or manage the environment as well as possible and connect with the student, so there will be an effective learning process.
       The first and second definitions are commonly used in most traditional societies. The result is they master all the knowledge but they don't know how to use and develop them. They seem like a baby who is given foods and drinks by the parents but they don't know where the food came from, how to make it, and how to get it. Meanwhile, in contrast with the first and second definition, the definition of teaching in the third model, is widely used now, especially in educational institutions in modern societies. The result is the students do not only master the learning material but also know their origins, how to obtain, and develop them. This global era really requires the graduates who are creative, innovative, dynamic and independent. By applying the third theory, then what happens not just teaching that results in the acquisition of knowledge, but also learning that produces mastery of method of science, skills, personality, and so on. In this way, self-learning activities will occur.

So let's have a look with this comparison....

 Traditional Classroom

1. The curriculum is presented part to whole, with emphasis on basic skills.
2. Strict adherence to the fixed curriculum is highly valued.
3. Every lesson relies heavily on textbooks.
4. Using cassette tape and recorder.
5. The teachers use the chalks or board marker and the board to write.
6. Students get the information with the spoonfeed by the teachers.
7. Teachers seek the correct answer to validate student learning.
8. Assessment of student learning is viewed as separate from teaching and occurs almost entirely through testing.
9. Students primarily work alone.

Constructivist Classroom 

1. The curriculum is presented whole to part with emphasis on big concepts.
2. Pursuit of student questions is highly valued.
3. Materials include primary sources and manipulatives.
4. Having some music and videos of education.
5. The teachers use the screen to show the materials.
6. The students do not always rely on the teachers, they have to learn to stand alone.
7. Teachers seek the students' points of view in order to understand students' present conceptions for use in subsequent lessons.
8. Assessment of student learning is interwoven with teaching and occurs through teacher observations of students at work and through students exhibitions.
9. Students primarily work in teams or groups.

Now we live in the modern era which we exquisitely depend on science and technology. But, it doesn't necessarily mean that we leave all the old things. The educational media is one of the factors that greatly affects the interaction between students and teacher. Teachers must be aware, appreciative and equipped using these tools. It must range from traditional to modern educational media that can support the learning of the students. Those all to help to maintain the good relationship between the teachers and thestudents in the new modern age.

7:05:00 PM

Mei 01, 2016, at 8:00 a.m
By Lisette Partelow 
Source : www.usnews.com/

A student prepares the food she is offered under the National School Lunch Program in March 2011, at McAuliffe Elementary School in Chicago. Schools can no longer count on using the program to determine the number of poor students they enroll, new research shows. (Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune/MCT via Getty Images)

It's becoming more difficult for schools to accurately gauge the number of poor students they enroll – an important metric that's used for everything from doling out federal aid to tracking academic performance and measuring achievement gaps.

For decades, schools have defined low-income students as those who enroll in the National School Lunch Program, which provides free- and reduced-priced lunch to eligible kids – those whose families below 185 percent of the federal poverty line, or about $45,000 for a family of four.

Title I: Rich School Districts Get Millions in Federal Money Meant for Poor Kids

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But that method "is quickly unravelling" and if left unchanged could have dire consequences for education policymakers and researchers warns a new report published Thursday by the Brookings Institution and written by Matthew Chingos, senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

"[Free- and reduced-priced lunch] participation data have long been put to research and policy uses for which they are ill-suited," Chingos says. "But FRL status is now headed toward its demise as a useful tool for research and policy."

Policymakers have long acknowledged that the proxy isn't perfect. But in more recent years, as the eligibility for the school lunch program has shifted in an effort to serve more students, the metric has become unreliable.

For starters, Chingos notes, the measurement only captures those who enroll in the school lunch program, and not those who are eligible for it. That means, for example, that two schools with similar student demographics could report dramatically different rates of poor students because one school might be more dogged in enrolling those who qualify. This has been a particular problem in high schools, where some students shirk their low-income status due to embarrassment or other factors.

Moreover, students who qualify for other public support programs, like food stamps, automatically qualify for the school lunch program regardless of where they fall on the federal poverty line.

Further complicating the accuracy of the metric, if 40 percent or more of students in a school qualify for other public support programs, the school is allowed under federal law to provide free lunch to all students in the entire school, negating the need for individual applications that identify accurate numbers.

The changes to the school lunch program have led to the number of students recorded as low-income consistently increasing, despite actual poverty measures falling and rising with the state of the economy, Chingos points out.

Recent data show substantially more kids are eligible for free- and reduced-priced lunch -- which is being used as a proxy for students living at 185 percent of the poverty line -- than there are kids who live in families below 200 percent of the poverty threshold.

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While increasing the number of students that have access to free lunch is a positive development, policymakers say, the thinned accuracy of the metric presents a big problem for education researchers – a large part of whose jobs include tracking the academic achievement of poor students to ensure they aren't falling further behind their wealthier peers.

Chingos estimates that because of the free- and reduced-priced lunch metric, up to two-thirds of schools are unable to accurately report student achievement for poor students.

"A failure to quickly identify and implement new measures of family background will render policymakers and researchers unable answer important questions and comply with federal education law," he says.

Notably, the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, maintains the federal requirement that states report student achievement data broken out by subgroups of students, including those who are low-income. Schools have traditionally used the number of students who qualify for free- and reduced-priced lunch as a way to measure this.

But with that metric becoming more and more diluted, Chingos says the Department of Education must release guidance for states and districts regarding new, more accurate measurements they could use. Those could potentially include, he offers, those who qualify for welfare, food stamps or Medicaid, or those enrolled in programs for homeless and foster youth.

"The core mission of the ESSA education law, like the No Child Left Behind Act before it, is at a minimum to shine a light on the academic performance of economically disadvantaged students," Chingos says. "These changes [to the school lunch program], they strike at the heart of that."

10:55:00 PM

April 29, 2016, at 8:00 a.m.
By Lisette Partelow | director of teacher policy at the Center for American Progress.
Source : www.usnews.com/ 

  

Here are some of the more outlandish predictions for the jobs people might hold in the future: mind-uploading specialist, personalized microbiome steward or de-extinction zoologist.

No one can really say for certain what the jobs of the future will be. A former educator argued that uncertainty about the future job market means that giving students opportunities to learn computer science, while trendy, is essentially pointless. Whatever students learn now will be as out of date as MS-DOS and car phones by the time they can put it to use, he reasoned.

He's not alone. It seems to have become fashionable nowadays to write naysayer articles about how popular efforts to expand computer science education are a waste of time.

Of course, many people disagree, and the popularity of code.org, Code Academy and other similar programs and websites attests to the widespread demand for computer science education. Last week, the Center for American Progress hosted an event in support of expanding computer science education in K-12 schools. The presenters discussed polling data showing the vast majority of American parents – 9 in 10 – want their kids to study computer science in school.

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Currently, only about a quarter of schools teach programming. Yet there will be three jobs available for every 2016 college graduate with a computer science degree, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates jobs in software development and other computer occupations are expected to increase at a much faster rate than that of other occupations over the next several years.

So what's with all of the skepticism? First to the former educator's point about technology becoming obsolete so quickly. Yes, the technology sector changes rapidly – when I was a teacher a few years ago, my first-grade students' eyes all went wide when I told them there were no internet, cell phones or iPads when I was growing up.

And it's true, the programming languages my classmates learned in high school and college are probably defunct by now. Yet those who pursued computer science back in those dark ages still managed to get jobs at Google and other prestigious tech firms and kept these jobs as technology changed. Like the rest of us, they learned to adapt on the job as their field shifted. Someone roughly my age managed to use these crude tools to design a little website you might have heard of called Facebook.

Once you have some foundational skills, you can evolve with the technology or figure out something new and exciting to use it for – but half the battle is getting that initial exposure. Data back this up: If a student takes AP computer science in high school, that student is eight times more likely to major in computer science in college. In the book "Outliers," Malcolm Gladwell attributes Bill Gates' success in part to getting very early exposure to computer programming, well before most people had access to computers at all.

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 The exposure element is especially important for female students and students of color, both of whom are woefully underrepresented in tech jobs. (Exposure, however, is not a complete solution; hiring discrimination also plays a role.)

Notably, as with many courses taken during one's educational career, computer science also teaches many generalizable skills. Computer science is much more than learning to code, and its benefits go beyond knowing a particular programming language. Computer science teaches students about logic, understanding systems and engineering and design basics, all of which are applicable to other academic and career fields. Perhaps this is why correlational data show that learning computer science is associated with higher math achievement. Computer science coursework also naturally lends itself to 21st century skills like collaboration, problem-solving and creativity, which are valuable and highly sought-after skills in the modern workplace.

Maybe the naysayers are right that the jobs of the future will be super-strange and that many of them won't require coding skills that look anything like what we are teaching students now. However, computers and computing are taking over nearly every aspect of our lives – Americans look at their smartphones an average of 46 times per day.

11:08:00 PM

What is the meaning of ICT in education?

But, before it let's clarify the meaning of ICT...

     ICT stands for information and communications technologies. ICT is an umbrella term that includes any communication device or application, encompassing: radio, television, cellular phones, computer and network hardware and software, satellite systems and so on, as well as the various services and applications associated with them, such as videoconferencing and distance learning. ICTs are often spoken of in a particular context, such as ICTs in education, health care, or libraries. The term is somewhat more common outside of the United States. 
So now, we're going to talk about the use ICT in education...

ICT in education 

In recent years there has been a groundswell of interest in how computers and the Internet can best be harnessed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of education at all levels and in both formal and non-formal settings.
A small percentage of schools in some countries achieved high levels of effective use of ICT to support and change the teaching and learning process in many subject areas.

Advantages of using ICT in education :
 A study by Blanskat, Blamire and Kefala (2006) shows that :

1.  ICT has positive impact on students' performances in primary schools particularly in English language and less in science.
2. Schools with higher level of e-maturity show a rapid increase in performances in scores compared to those with lower level. 
3. Schools with sufficient ICT resources achieved better results than those that are not well-equipped. 
4. Pupils are more motivated when computers and Internet are being used in class. 

Syed Noor-UI-Amin from University of Kahmir wrote a paper on effective use of ICT for education and learning, to put it simply, he stated in his paper that :

1.  ICT encahnces teaching & learning process.
2. ICT enhances the quality & accessibility of education.
3. ICT enhances learning environment.
4. ICT enhances learning motivation.
5. ICT enhances scholastic performance.

How can ICT help expand access to education?

ICT has a huge potential to facilitate the learning opportunities, both formal and non-formal education, and nowadays it is also scattered to the rural population, indeed some of traditional group prohibiting for the education due to cultural or social reasons such as ethnic minorities, girls, the disabled, as well as those who can't enroll in college caused of cost or time.  

• Anytime and anywhere, one characteristic of ICTs is their ability to transcend space and time. ICT enables asynchronous learning, or learning characterized by a time lag between the delivery instructions and acceptance by learners. For example, online course materials are accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and it means every time. ICT based on education ( for example, education programs on radio or television ) also dispenses with the need for all learners even without face-to-face can be done by using teleconference that allows instruction to be received simultaneously by all of learners who are scattered throughout any state.
• Teachers and students do not rely any longer to the printed books and any other physical media in the library which available on a limited amount for their educational needs. With Internet, the wealth learning materials in almost every subjects and in every medium, can be accessed from anytime of the day and with unlimited number of people.
• An accessible product or service is one that can be used by all of its intended users, taking into account their differing capabilities. Accessible ICTs have the potential to provide persons with disabilities unprecedented levels of access to education, skills training and employment, as well as the opportunity to participate in the economic, cultural and social life of their community

11:35:00 PM