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NEWS AND COMMENTARY


Schools must embrace mobile technology

The need for schools to prepare for 21st century learning was top of the agenda at the 2010 British Education and Training Technology (BETT) Conference 2010, the world's biggest educational technology show, that was held in London from January 13-16.

According to leading educationalist Professor Stephen Heppell, the schools must embrace mobile technologies, games, podcasts and social networking He argued that they should also break away from traditional classroom and curriculum models, saying that the gap between schools embracing technology and those that are not is getting bigger.

Meanwhile, Vernon Coaker, Minister of the United Kingdom for Schools and Families, reiterated the government’s commitment to putting technology at the heart of the school curriculum.

“Teachers need access to innovative services,” Mr. Coaker said. “We must prepare pupils for the future workplace. Cutting edge technology is the cornerstone of our reforms.”

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Schoolchildren told to avoid Wikipedia but to use Google and Yahoo instead

Children should use Google and Yahoo to improve their essays, according to the official exams watchdog in the United Kingdom.
 
Ofqual said putting keywords into internet search engines was a “good starting point” when researching pieces of coursework and dissertations.

But guidance sent out to schoolchildren in England warns pupils to be extremely wary when using other websites such as Wikipedia.

The on-line encyclopaedia – created using contributions from readers – was not “authoritative or accurate” and in some cases “may be completely untrue,” said Ofqual.
Children can also be easily tripped up by copying passages from websites containing American phrases and spellings – a clear sign of plagiarism.

The comments were made in a series of documents sent to pupils, parents and teachers warning against cheating at school.

Ministers have already outlined plans to scrap GCSE coursework in most subjects – replacing it with controlled projects in the classroom under teacher supervision. It followed the publication of a report that warned coursework had become "less valid" as children were increasingly tempted by websites offering to help them script essays.

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Too much rap, not enough proper poetry, says former laureate

Teachers are failing to stretch children's imaginations by giving them football chants and raps in literature lessons rather than poems that challenge them, the former poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion said today.

Schools are underestimating pupils' intelligence and stifling their creativity by only offering them chants and raps or the verses of children's poets, such as Spike Milligan and Roald Dahl, Motion told the North of England Education Conference in York.

Motion, poet laureate for a decade until last year, said many English teachers were not "equipped" to teach poetry and simply passed on their anxiety for the subject. Less than half of teachers are English graduates, he said, and lack confidence when teaching poetry.

He attacked the education system for its "tick box" culture, which he said put too little emphasis on fuelling the imagination and pupils' emotional response to literature.

Teachers are being trained to tell children that to explain a poem all you did was "add up the similes, spot the alliteration and say something about the verse structure," he said.

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Study calls attention to speech disorders

A U.K. study finds that one in six children struggle with speech, due in part to busier parents, but the outlook may not be as bleak as it seems.

Children’s communication expert Jean Gross blames children’s increased TV-watching and video/computer game-usage, and less time spent with adults and parents, according to Rachel Williams in The Guardian. Research also revealed that “twice as many boys struggle as girls,” and that nearly a quarter of children with speech difficulties do not get any help, leaving them at risk for “mental health problems” or future run-ins with the law. Statistics were gleaned from a survey of 1,000 parents living in England, carried out by YouGov.

Gross said higher mortgages and other costs of living are preventing overworked parents from spending necessary time with their children. According to Williams, Gross offered this bit of advice: “Think about what children need. It's not expensive toys and big houses. It's you."

What are the solutions for busy parents?

The BBC posts a video of an interview with Gross, in which she says parents need access to expert advice before children begin school, and that “more speech language therapists” are needed in “the school setting.”

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Google News tool to allow online media opt out

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP)—Google News has launched a “news-specific crawler” that lets online media automatically keep stories, photos, or video out of its index.

The announcement comes a day after the California-based Internet giant said it is letting publishers limit the number of online pages people can view after being routed to their websites by Google’s search engine. Publishers have always been able to block Google from including their website content in the search engine index.

Google senior business product manager Josh Cohen said in a blog post that a new “web crawler” extends that option to Google News. Web crawlers are automated programs that scour the Internet for content and then index it in databases routinely mined for results to online search queries.

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Technology gives kids a window on world

OSAKA—Students at Mikanodai Primary School in Kawachi-Nagano, Osaka Prefecture, occasionally enjoy speaking English to their counterparts in Australia—without ever traveling out of the city. The public school takes full advantage of an Internet teleconference system as part of its English lessons.

On an early autumn day, for example, about 40 fifth graders gathered in front of a television screen that was displaying a live image of a girl at Wodonga West Primary School in Victoria, Australia.

Konnichiwa. Watashi no namae wa Anii desu. Tempura o tabemasu (Hello. My name is Annie. I enjoy eating tempura),” said the girl, who received a round of applause from the other side of the equator.

During the half-hour session, Mikanodai and Wodonga West students spoke to each other in English and Japanese. They introduced themselves and had a question-and-answer session, while also singing together and playing a paper-rock-scissors game.

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Number of institutions accepting TOEFL surpasses 7,300 worldwide

PRINCETON, NJ—Educational Testing Service (ETS) announced today that more than 7,300 institutions worldwide are now accepting the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) test to assess English-language proficiency for both undergraduate and graduate applicants.

Of this number of educational institutions accepting the TOEFL test, about 5,175 are located in the United States and Canada, 1,000 in continental Europe, 200 in the United Kingdom, 600 in Asia, 100 in Australia and New Zealand, with the majority of the remaining institutions located in Africa and the Middle East.

Within the last year alone, an additional 383 institutions have become TOEFL score users and the number of institutions signing on to use TOEFL scores continues to increase at a fast pace, the ETS said.
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In response to the growing demand for the TOEFL test by colleges and universities, ETS has increased the number of test administration sites to allow greater access and flexibility for test takers. Currently, there are more than 4,500 test administration sites globally.

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Children’s schooling should start at six, a British study recommends

Schoolchildren should not start formal lessons until they turn six, and Sats should be scrapped to relieve the damaging pressure England's young pupils face, the biggest inquiry into primary education for 40 years concludes today.

In a damning indictment of Labour’s education record since 1997, the Cambridge University-led review accuses the government of introducing an educational diet "even narrower than that of the Victorian elementary schools".

It claims that successive Labour ministers have intervened in England’s classrooms on an unprecedented scale, controlling every detail of how teachers teach in a system that has “Stalinist overtones.” It says they have exaggerated progress, narrowed the curriculum by squeezing out space for history, music and arts, and left children stressed-out by the testing and league table system.

The review is the biggest independent inquiry into primary education in four decades, based on 28 research surveys, 1,052 written submissions and 250 focus groups. It was undertaken by 14 authors, 66 research consultants and a 20-strong advisory committee at Cambridge University, led by Professor Robin Alexander, one of the most experienced educational academics in the country.

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Wikipedia edit system should be in place by year's end

The English-language Wikipedia should have a system in place by December to vet anonymous edits for certain high-profile entries, according to the online encyclopedia's founder.

The system, called "flagged revisions," would allow anonymous users to make changes to certain pages. However, the edits must be approved before going live, said Jimmy Wales on Tuesday. The system is already in place for the German version of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, which is run by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, said in January that it would test the flagged revisions system on the English pages. That followed a couple of notable incidents where the biographies of U.S. senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd had been wrongly changed to say both men had died.

Other Wikipedia entries have also been subject to frequent vandalism. In response, Wikipedia locked the entries and required those who wanted to edit to be logged in. New registrants had to wait four days before they could submit changes, which then had to be approved.

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