Use of ICT in Learning and Teaching

  Chapter 20: Arts & Crafts is way to enhance creativity in learners  Date:  1st July 2024 Monday 1:18 pm & 2:30 pm This is another interesting post about arts and crafts. I remember writing about the newspaper arts and crafts activity with the amazing learners at the Ranaa Child Welfare Foundation in Peshawar. As shared earlier Ranaa Child Welfare Foundation is a school for street children in Peshawar, which is  doing an awesome job providing quality education to street children in Peshawar. I am honoured to play my part in providing quality education to these learners with immense support and encouragement from Ranaa Child Welfare Foundation. This post will focus an two lessons that were taught before Eid ul Azha. The students made wonderful Eid cards for their teachers and they made an amazing painting using brush strokes. Let us look at the first lesson , I was exploring online arts and crafts activities when I came across a simple yet interesting art act...

Chapter 19: Learning to Code in Scratch - Part 2 Date: 27th June 2024 - Thursday  2:21 am & Saturday  29th June 5:02 am This is also a very interesting post about teaching coding skills in Scratch to the amazing learners at Ranaa Child Welfare Foundation, which is a school for street children in Peshawar. In these days the learners learned how to animate their names in Scratch and practiced creating a scoring game in Scratch. This is a little more challenging and requires understanding of the code. It was good to see the learners eager and keen to learn coding. Coding actually provides opportunity for creativity and enhances perseverence and grit in learners. It enables them to make mistakes and keep practicing to find the right solution. They learn at their own pace. The lesson started with demonstrating how to animate names. I demonstrated using my laptop how to animate the different letters in the first name. This included adding sprites, changing backgrounds, adding mo...

Chapter 18: Learning to Code in Scratch - Part 1 Date: 25th June 2024 - Tuesday 1:32 pm & 2:45 pm This is yet another interesting post about teaching coding skills to the amazing learners at the Ranaa Child Welfare Foundation, which is a school for street children in Peshawar. They are doing an awesome job trying to provide quality education experiences to under privileged children in the society. I am honoured to play a small yet pivotal role in contributing in positive ways. This post will reflect on todays learning experience in Scratch. Scratch is available online and anyone can start creating in Scratch within seconds.  I had started teaching coding skills to learners some two weeks back in Turtle Academy which is important because it teaches learners the very basic skills in coding. We spent some time practicing coding in Turtle Academy and I wanted to revise today but somehow the link was down and neither the learners nor I could work on Turtle Academy. I had already pla...

  Chapter 17: Creating Pictures Frames Using Newspapers  Date:15th June 2024 Saturday 1:45 am & 3:30 am This is yet another interesting post about an interesting session on newspaper craft. This session was held at the Ranaa Child Welfare Foundation, a school for street children in Peshawar. They learned about making paper bags and other objects using old newspapers. The technology use was minimal and mostly students focused on the arts and crafts work. It was great to see the learners trying and putting in an effort to make new objects by just watching the videos on YouTube on the laptop. The lesson started off with a discussion on recycling and reusing objects, for example old newspapers, water bottles, cans , shoe boxes etc. After a little discussion learners came up with different ideas about recycling and reusing objects. They could discuss the impact of plastic bags on the environment, and how these plastic bags could block the rivers and cause damage to the environm...

  Chapter 16: Learning to Code using Turtle Academy  Date: 10th June 2024 Monday 6:50 pm & 8:45 pm This is yet another very interesting post on an amazing edtech resource named “Turtle Academy” for learning coding. I remember exploring the site before as well but being able to use it with the amazing learners at the Ranaa Child Welfare Foundation is actually a great learning experience for me too. As I shared before as well, I work voluntarily at the Ranaa Child Welfare Foundation as part of my initiative “ Technology For a Cause - Enhancing Skills Empowering Kids” voluntarily to provide quality education experiences to the underprivileged children in Peshawar. This post is based on the lesson taught using Turtle Academy. It is a simply wonderful resource online that can be used to teach basic coding skills to learners at the primary or the secondary level. It has a very simple and easy to use interface. I really like the practice exercises with solutions given. I actuall...