Use of ICT in Learning and Teaching

Designing Learning Experiences Online Part 1 2nd Sep 2020/Wednesday This blog post is inspired from my online course with #ISTE about designing learning experiences online. Its an insight into what is online learning and what are the important elements that need to be taken into account while designing experiences online. This is important for us as educators because due to COVID most learning is happening remotely and online. We will look into strategies that could be used to make learning online more effective and meaningful. So, lets begin. Online  learning is basically the combination of instruction and assessment that happens online. Where as blended learning is a combination of both face to face and online instruction but it includes student agency. We will look into what is student agency and why is it important for online learning.We need to differentiate between asynchronous learning and synchronous learning. Asynchronous learning means that both the instructor, the audien...

Differentiated VS Personalized VS Individualized Learning Date: 23/09/2018 Sunday This blogpost is inspired from my twitter chat today organized by #edchatmena about individualized, personalized and differentiated learning.  It was so good to interact with a very experienced and knowledgeable group of educators who were able to share some amazing resources about the three different learning approaches. I did have some understanding about differentiated learning in classrooms, but the twitter chat helped build a much clearer understanding of the three approaches.  According to an article by Dale Basye differentiation is a type of learning where instruction is tailored to meet the needs of learners in class, the learning objectives remain the same, but teachers can use different resources, different strategies , providing students different paths to students to achieve their learning goals. There are different types of differentiation. Lets look at each in detail....

The Khan Academy Date: 2nd July 2018/Monday This blogpost is inspired from my dive into the Khan Academy, which is a non profit educational organization created by educator Salman Khan in 2006 with the aim to develop online tools to assist students develop a deeper understanding of different taught concepts related to Math, Science, Art and Humanities, Grammar, Economics, exams like SAT, GMAT etc. It is a huge repository of interactive quizzes, reading articles  and video based lessons. It is free and anyone can join. I will begin by briefly describing the joining procedure, creating accounts, creating classes and adding students, assign tasks and monitoring progress reports. I have imported my two classes from the Google Classroom. The resource has been used with kids at both the SOS Children Village and Ranaa Child Welfare Foundation (a school for street children in Peshawar). Mostly used for practicing grammar and different math concepts for grades KG and above.I can alw...

Exploring the world of Reading Eggs !!! Date: 30/05/2018 - Wednesday This blog post is simply inspired from my recent dive into the Reading Eggs program by 3P Learning . It is basically a reading program aimed at improving and enhancing reading skills of kids through online interactive activities and games. I must say it has a very colorful, attractive and a very easy to use interface for kids. Its been almost two weeks or so since I have been using the free trial of the program with the kids at the SOS Children Village Peshawar . I was amazed to see their interest and engagement during the various activities. After a brief introduction kids were able to do the various activities on their own. So what are the highlights of this program and why I would strongly recommend it for kids (whether at school or home). One of the best features is the Placement test at the beginning of the program, every child is suppose to do the test based on MCQs, which assess the child's basic ...