Saturday, November 22, 2014

Should schools be organized in such a way that student diversity of all kinds can be included as a resource ? Seeing individual differences not as a problem to be fixed but as opportunities for enriched learning.

(The title is adopted from an article published by IBO named "Learning diversity in the International
Baccalaureate programmes:Special educational needs within the International Baccalaureate programmes")


Is this right? [source: http://www.edstructure.org/p/knowing.html]

You will be agree with me on the fact that there is diversity in the student body. So when Ms. Moon[a teacher] starts giving instruction on "life cycle of a tree"  in her class, every student try to make sense of it in their own way.

Ms. Moon's audience includes visual learner, auditory learner, read-write learners, kinesthetic learners and many more. Parents  have sent their children to her class with the same expectation to gain knowledge. Mr. Gotiya would not prefer to send his child Shymal to a special school with special educational arrangements, instead he would like Shymal to attend classes with everyone else in his neighbour. Ms. Moon plans her lesson to address the needs of the classroom as a whole rather than focusing only on gifted and talented.


I would certainly bargain on behalf of student body and urge schools to frame their curriculum to support all types of learners. Schools should discover ways to uplift all children and help them gaining self confidence in their persuasion of knowledge.Generic teaching methods will not contribute to all learner at all times[Taken from IBO guide on special education]. I stand by Ms. Moon's approach to show variety of ways to represent life cycle of a tree, as it benefits not only those who have diverse needs but all students including the gifted and talented.

For visual learners of Ms. Moon's class. [Source: http://www.nwf.org/trees-for-wildlife/benefits-for-wildlife.aspx]

Now when a teacher plan-reflect-plan lessons as per the needs of his/her pupils, it leads to a whole bunch of new resources for the teacher. Later, these new resources can be incorporated in future classes for enriched learning of each and every student. To be successful in doing so as teachers we should increase understanding of  who we teach and what we teach[Tomlinson and Edison(2003)].

On the other side, it requires schools to allocate dedicated time for a teacher to plan, implement, review and adjust as per the needs of the diverse classroom scenario. Schools have started to encourage inclusive education so that teachers do not see individual differences as problem to be fixed but discover opportunities for enriched learning[Taken from IBO guide on special education]. But again that obviously increases cost of providing curriculum hence sometimes ineffective. Therefore it is vital that schools allocate necessary budget towards inclusive education for it to be successful in all respect.


At the end I would like to ask, as teacher do you want to treat your student as copy of the other?[Adopted from http://www.edstructure.org/] Or will you be flexible enough to accommodate them individually?





Monday, November 17, 2014

Diigo Research Synthesis

Entering into the world of Diigo

I remember one of the colleagues in my previous workplace was guiding his students to keep the record of web research by simply saving the URLs in a notepad for future reference. I too was concerned about referencing the web sources. Now with the social bookmarking Diigo , there has been paradigm shifts in my web storages. It is what I started saying "Diigo-Daily Information Integrating Genius, On-demand!"


Some of the things I have done with Diigo

PDF marking 
Work from a PDF annotation

Book marking web with specific images
Screen shot from Diigo Group

Before stepping  into Diigo I used Padlet walls to organize my classes with students. Where student could add several multimedia resources for future use. In my view Diigo is superior to Padlet. As Kevin  said Diigo is dynamic and being at several palaces at one time.

I am loving it!

Thanks Kevin :)