Friday, October 5, 2012

'Take a stand for teachers' and Let’s thank our teachers

In celebration of World Teachers’ Day on Oct. 5, Education Secretary Bro. Armin Luistro urged the nation to look kindly at our mentors and give them the recognition they deserve by saying “Thank You.”
“All of us were once students and we all have at least one teacher who have made a difference in our lives and to whom we owe who we are today,” Luistro said.

Read more
http://manilastandardtoday.com/2012/10/04/lets-thank-our-teachers/



MANILA, Philippines - The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) highlighted the importance of giving teachers the "recognition and support they deserve" as countries celebrate World Teachers' Day today, October 5. It has chosen "Take a stand for teachers" as this year's theme.

"Teachers are the custodians of learning; they impart knowledge, values and skills; at their best, they tap into the hopes and talents of young people and help them to grow into productive citizens. Yet too often, teachers are not given the recognition and support they deserve," said UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova in a message published in the UNESCO website.

"On World Teachers Day, I pay tribute to the millions of teachers around the world who are working with passion and skill to nurture their students and whose influence on our world is potentially profound. Let us recognize that investing in teachers is a wise investment in our efforts to build strong economies, cohesive societies and a future of dignity and opportunity for all," Bokova said


Thursday, September 20, 2012

A Digital Tool to Unlock Learning

One way to help students gain agency over their own education is through technology.  A  free Web-based platform CFY developed called PowerMyLearning which contains 1,000 (soon to be 2,800) digital learning activities and games from across the Web that have been carefully selected and categorized by teachers and education specialists.
 
The program appears to have made a big difference especially for struggling students. The school reports that the percentage of last year’s sixth graders with learning disabilities who met or exceeded standards in math (testing at level 3 or 4) increased by 36 percent, while the percentage of students who had been below standard (testing at level 1) decreased from 23 percent to zero.
 

Monday, September 3, 2012

Philippine DepEd to hire 61,000 new teachers next year

Education officials on Monday said the department’s P293-billion budget was intended to end the backlog in facilities for public school children.


During the budget hearing, Tinio also pitched for higher pay for volunteer kindergarten teachers, as well as for the regularization of all 23,000 of them. The volunteer teachers get a P3,000 honorarium a month, but could get up to P6,000 if they teach two sessions.

Luistro said about 8,000 of them were scheduled to be regularized in 2013.
 
Aside from hiring 61,000 new teachers, the education department would procure 907,000 seats and 31 million textbooks and other learning materials, Undersecretary Francis Varela said.

Read more here  http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/263532/deped-to-hire-61000-new-teachers-next-year

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

How To Find Your Own Online Classes

 If you're looking for more or more varied course material, here are some resources to help you find great, university-level online classes that you can take from the comfort of your desk, at any time of day.

  • Academic Earth curates an amazing list of video seminars and classes from some of the world's smartest minds, innovators, and leaders on a variety of topics including science, mathematics, politics, public policy, art, history, and more.
  • TED talks are well known for being thought provoking, interesting, intelligent, and in many cases, inspiring and informative. We've featured TED talks at Lifehacker before, and if you're looking for seminars on the web worth watching, TED is worth perusing.
  • edX is a collection of free courses from leading Universities like the University of California, Berkeley, MIT, and Harvard. There aren't many, but the ones offered are free, open to the public, and they rotate often.
  • Coursera has a broad selection of courses in-session or beginning shortly that you can take for academic credit (if you're enrolled) or just a certificate of completion that shows you've learned a new skill. Topics range from science and technology to social science and humanities, and they're all free.
  • Udacity offers a slimmer selection of courses, but the ones offered are not only often for-credit, but they're instructor led and geared towards specific goals, with skilled and talented instructors walking you through everything from building a startup to programming a robotic car.
  • Education-Portal.com has a list of universities offering free and for-credit online classes to students and the public at large.
  • Open Culture's list of free online courses is broken down by subject matter and includes classes available on YouTube, iTunes U, and direct from the University or School's website.
  • The Open Courseware Consortium is a collection of colleges and universities that have all agreed to use a similar platform to offer seminars and full classes—complete with notes, memos, examinations, and other documentation free on the web. They also maintain a great list of member schools around the world, so you can visit universities anywhere in the world and take the online classes they make available.
  • The Khan Academy offers free YouTube-based video classes in math, science, technology, the humanities, and test preparation and study skills. If you're looking to augment your education or just take a couple video classes in your spare time, it's a great place to start and has a lot of interesting topics to offer.
  • The University of Reddit is a crowd-built set of classes and seminars by Reddit users who have expertise to share. Topics range from computer science and programming to paleontology, narrative poetry, and Latin. Individuals interested in teaching classes regularly post to the University of Reddit subthread to gauge interest in future couses and announce when new modules are available.
  • The Lifehacker Night School is our own set of tutorials and classes that help you out with deep and intricate subjects like becoming a better photographer, building your own computer, or getting to know your network, among others.
 
Duolingo to the list, its ace for learning a new language! I'm halfway through Spanish at the moment - [duolingo.com]
 
[Saylor.org] is another great resource for free online learning.
 
 

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Best Jobs/ Best Occupations/ Best Courses for 2012

All of our Best Jobs of 2012 are outstanding, but the top 25 make for a particularly great career choice. We’ve ranked them, comparing their projected growth to the year 2020 to their industry’s employment rate. Also contributing to a job’s overall score is its average salary, predicted job prospects, and a quantitative assessment of job satisfaction.
http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/the-25-best-jobs


Jobs Rated 2012: Ranking 200 Jobs From Best to Worsthttp://www.careercast.com/jobs-rated/2012-ranking-200-jobs-best-worst
 

U.S. Universities Reshaping Education on the Web

As part of a seismic shift in online learning that is reshaping higher education, Coursera, a year-old company founded by two Stanford University computer scientists, will announce on Tuesday that a dozen major research universities are joining the venture. In the fall, Coursera will offer 100 or more free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, that are expected to draw millions of students and adult learners globally. 

Over the past decade, online instruction has exploded in higher education.
Take the World's Best Courses, Online, For Free.
https://www.coursera.org/

Over 1,000,000 Downloadable Books, Music, and Movies free

The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge" It offers permanent storage of and free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public-domain books.

http://archive.org/index.php

Free computer science online tutorial service Khan

On Wednesday, free online tutorial service Khan Academy will launch a new series of instructional videos covering the field of computer science.

"This project is going to blow the doors off Computer Science education," boasted Khan's dean of computer science and noted JavaScript programmer John Resig, in a Twitter message. "I have a feeling that people are going to have A LOT of fun with it."
 
Watch. Practice. Learn almost anything for free.

With over 3,300 videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice, we're on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.
 
Khan Academy offers more than 3,000 free instructional videos in various subjects, including math, physics, finance, and history.
 
 
for more information on computer science go to my blog

http://itphilippines.blogspot.com/

 
Introduction to programming and computer science