What does it take to run an educational institution? Besides the basic infrastructure, various amenities, and the technologically inclined learning aspects, the main drivers that make the school an ‘institute of imparting knowledge’ is its workforce or better known as the school’s employees.

At any primary or secondary institute, you should know that teachers and the Principal are not the only ones who run the show. There are a bunch of other support staff who equally contribute in keeping the light of education burning. There are administrative and finance personnel who are at the helm of affairs and act as a strong backbone for the foundation. Then there are peons, technicians, cooks, and other helping staff who run around to ensure that there is no interruption in functioning of the school’s daily agenda. And lastly there are education counsellors, librarians, examination officers, and other vocational faculty staff who add equal value to the child’s development.

That was quite and extensive list and you can imagine the amount of administrative efforts it would take to manage track records of all these school staff members. Maintaining individual folders with paperwork is quite cumbersome and chances of error or misplacement of documents are high.

Digital School Management Platform

ERP software have changed the way data is managed in schools. It acts as a tool that offers many advantages and reduces load on the administrative team. The Next Learning Platform is one such cloud-based tool that supports the school’s administrative and academic processes. Being a one-stop solution, this software is widely acceptable in Middle East countries and when integrated is capable of managing the entire school’s records in an organized manner. Efficient staff management is one of its features and the double-layer encrypted security ensures that data privacy is not compromised upon. Let’s have a look at the magnanimous possibilities of exploring the viability of using an ERP solution for administrative activities:

Data Management

When any employee or staff is hired into a school, they are asked to fill forms and submit verification documents. Digitalizing this process would mean asking the onboarding staff to fill forms online along with their digital signatures and send scanned copies of important documents. Can you imagine how much time & effort could be saved by moving the process online! When a staff leaves the data can be archived and removed from the existing staff member’s list almost instantly. Taking advantage of the ease, a number of -12 schools in Dubai have opted for The Next Learning Platform and integrated it into their daily operations.

Leave Management

The leave structure for school staff members holding different roles could be dissimilar. An assistant trainee teacher may not be eligible for as many leaves as the head teacher gets. Similarly, the admin staff get a shorter Summer break than the educators. Even the leave approval process has to pass from junior to senior hierarchy levels and then finally ‘accepted’ by the Principal or the Centre Head. The ERP tool streamlines this entire leave process and makes it easy for everyone within the institution to apply for leaves via their profiles on the digital staff portal and get it approved by their head staff.

Payroll Management

Having to calculate every school staff’s salary can consume days on end. Salary is linked not only to the number of days the staff was present in school, but also whether the person was on time. Then there are certain allocated leaves that are not deducted from salary, while others may lead to a pay cut. An ERP system is designed to collate, calculate, and arrive at a figure which is accurately computed by the system. The Next Learning Platform’s Payroll Management system is customizable and education institutes in the GCC countries like UAE and Kuwait are already reaping benefits from it.

Task Management

Often staff members have internal meetings to discuss their strategies of curriculum planning and assign timelines to ensure the assigned syllabus is taught to children. ERP systems help to check the status of tasks assigned and ensure all the stakeholders are in loop rather than wasting time conducting countless catch-up meetings. ERP systems indeed makes your job easy!

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Kai’s Clan deals with adventures in the way coding is taught to children through cloud-based collaborative programming and robotics environment. They believe in making coding a fun experience by using AR and VR features to create an interactive environment. Imaging how amazing it would be to be able to do whatever you wish to! Maybe you desire to have superpowers or reach the planet Jupiter in a jiffy. Well it’s not practically possible, but Kai’s Clan makes it happen, at least in a Virtual game-like setting. Kai’s Clan creates a world where the reality world merges with the virtual world to become an interactive playground for students. Their goal has been to develop and nurture an interest in coding amongst children with the help of AR and VR platforms.

The terms AR and VR might sound very new to you or you might have come across these terms but don’t know exactly what they mean, right? If yes, then don’t worry because this blog will help you understand AR and VR in detail.

AR and VR Explained

AR stands for Augmented Reality. It is an amplified version of the real world and can be achieved through the use of digital visual elements & surround sounds. It has been an ongoing trend and Kai’s Clan takes this concept a notch higher. Dubai in the UAE has always been technologically ahead of its time and the VR Park within the Dubai Mall is quite an attraction for visitors and locals alike.

VR stands for Virtual Reality. It is a simulated experience that can give the users a real world like experience or a completely out-of-Earth experience, depending on what the user chooses. A person can interact within an artificial three-dimensional environment by using electronic devices, special goggles or gloves fitted with sensors in them.

More About Kai’s Clan

Kai’s Clan is a great platform for students to experience AR and VR phenomena from the boundaries of their classrooms. According to one of the teachers, AR experience made her feel like she was in a factory and actually doing something rather than just coding. Now AR and VR classrooms help in manipulating each other’s world in a virtual setting and open-up a new dimension for learning and collaboration. Here’s a bit more on the aspects that Kai’s Clan focuses on:

Built-in Classrooms

Kai’s Clan has a built-in classroom management system to allocate robots to students. The classrooms give an authentic and engaging learning experience to the students. Students are likely to love such an experience because it gives a feeling of the classroom being real even if it’s virtual. That means if your leaners were at home during the pandemic, they can still continue to work on their group projects with their classmates who are also based out of different locations. How cool is it to be able to work your very own classroom environment and interact with your classmates, without actually being physically close to each other! Kai’s Clan has managed to dissolve all Geographic barriers and encouraged say an enthusiastic coder from Bahrain in the GCC to interact with a young coder in Chicago and exchange their learnings.

Multiplayer Collaborative

Coding Students can use coordinates and sensor data from other robots in their own code. Kai’s Clan believes that coding shouldn’t be a solo activity and students should learn how to collaborate while learning to code. This can also help students improve their interaction skills and make them more confident team-players.

Creative & Interactive Environment

Virtual reality experience by Kai’s Clan is simply not just a trip to Mars or some ancient village but in this case, students can code their robots to move around on the AR & VR adventure mat and enjoy it as if it’s real. Students’ robots are represented like an avatar, depending on their role and each avatar can bring in their share of creativity to the coding project.

All of these features can make learning so much fun, don’t you think? So, next time students won’t look for excuses to miss a coding class because they would want to attend their class and live in the Virtual world. Thanks to Kai’s Clan!

Kai’s Clan has various products available for education institutions in the Middle East. Some of them are; Kai’s Clan classroom pack (12 pack), Kai’s Clan Start Pack (4 pack) and Kai’s Clan Booster Bots (4 pack).

Kai’s Clan even has a group of certified teachers who help in personal development and training the students. All you need to do is sign up for the class. They teach everything from basics to intermediate level.

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We have all noticed the gradual switch from traditional to digital. Especially, after the pandemic, everyone has got a hang of working, studying and getting the latest updates of news and entertainment online.

Schools and teachers have also managed to teach children online through their websites. It has become easy and efficient for educators to go through every student’s record personally by referring to digital records. There is a weekly and monthly report with feedbacks sent by the teachers to parents to evaluate the student’s learning journey. In advanced countries like Dubai in the Middle East and many other countries across the world, schools have adopted to the online assessment system by moving from paper and pen examinations.

This makes it easy for children to attempt their assessments from home and gives the educator access to their worksheets. The digital scoring helps parents and teachers to analyze if the student is doing great or requires any improvement on certain topics. Online assessments are considered to be the future of education because they make learning easier by driving proper feedbacks in a timely manner, rather than waiting for the parents to come to school and then discuss their child’s performance. Timely scoring leads to timely feedback and immediate amendments can be brough to the teaching-learning process. Here are some advantages of online assessments that have been endorsed by schools in most tech-savvy countries including the UAE.

Clearing Doubts

Many students often tend to have doubts and the online assessment has made it easier for educators to resolve these doubts almost immediately. When the child is attempting to appear for the ‘online assessment’ and they get stuck at a particular topic, they can quickly approach their teacher and get the doubts cleared. Also, once the assessments are evaluated, children get an e-copy of their corrected assessments with detailed remarks mentioned by the teacher. Children & parents can easily open the remarks window and check where the child has faltered and then work towards improving their knowledge about the topic.

Customizing Assessments

Every child learns at his own pace and so it makes sense to have a mechanism by the school of allocating a different set of assessment questions, depending on the child’s capabilities. There are slow learners or students who have learning difficulties and they would get intimidated by the assessment if the level of difficulty is too high. So online assessments can be easily customized to match the child’s learning potential.

Online Meeting with Parents

If the student is not able to focus in the e-class, then teachers can simply conduct an online meeting with their parents and discuss the issue. Parents will then be able to understand what they need to do on their part to help their children.

Proper Evaluation

Now that teachers have started using online apps to evaluate and store every student’s performance, they can easily evaluate the child’s learning graph and suggest parents to be more involved in the child’s learning journey or maybe get their child enrolled into effective e-learning support platforms.

Environment Friendly Mechanism

You would agree that every small step goes a long way in making our planet a better place to live in. Instilling a sense of environment consciousness amongst children at an early age teaches them to be more responsible green heroes of tomorrow! Saving the unnecessary usage of paper, ink, and other resources that are harmful for the environment can be eliminated by going digital & having the assessments online instead. Bahrain which is amongst the member GCC countries, is constantly promoting environmental-friendly purchases and creating awareness to opt for electric cars, as also, eco-friendly goods and homes.

Markezy is a powerful, innovative digital platform that enhances the education experience by bringing valuable technology for student assessments. The tools help not only in evaluating but also in analyzing how students perform. Markezy allows students, parents, and educators to notice knowledge gaps, provide quick feedback and achieve the best outcome.

You can now utilize the latest technology to streamline and improve your grading system. Thanks to Markezy! It also offers you the flexibility to accommodate a range of teaching and learning styles. You’ll find that advanced analytic tools by Markezy will help you make the best data-based decisions for students. The amazing part about this tool is that you can use it anytime and anywhere. You get access to over 94,000 standard-based items from Certica’s Navigate Item base. The major benefits are improved learning and quick feedback!

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Science Education is known to cultivate certain qualities in children such as key life skills. It develops an ability to communicate, remain organized and focused and form their own opinions through observation. It also helps them with collaborative skills, teamwork, logical reasoning and analytical skills.

Some schools in developed countries such as the USA and UAE including GCC have begun opening up new channels of education for children regarding our planet so they can have a more nature-friendly future and be ecologically responsible.

One such way is the introduction of Ecosystem Diversity Kits. These Ecosystem Diversity Kits take students on an exploration of what living things need to survive in their particular environments.

Here are some ways they can prove to be very valuable in a classroom:

Teaches the children to cooperate

Children, from an early age, need to learn to be able to work together to succeed at and achieve greater things. With the Ecosystem Diversity Kit, children can study and observe cooperative skills in nature first-hand. From a colony of ants having designated roles to function better as a society, to humans working together to build structures to live in, cooperation is an intrinsic part of nature. Pooling in each individual’s qualities to finish work quicker will better their chance at success than a single person doing all the work. Hence instilling the values of cooperation amongst children will go a long way in shaping them into responsibly inclusive members of the society.

Gives them a wider understanding of nature and our planet

Global warming, once a problem thought to have been for the future has become a real part of our lives today. We experience it in every season and with the rising temperatures, it is a big threat to our planet. The younger generation can learn from the past and try to live in a more nature-friendly manner utilizing and cultivating certain methods for a more ecologically conscious life. This can be achieved by the Ecosystem Diversity Kits as they will help in understanding how an ecosystem functions in its natural habitat, what part humans play in conserving it or damaging it and how global warming can affect its conditions.

Opens them up to responsibility

Ecosystem Diversity Kits provide children with hands-on learning of plant life and how they contribute to the animals that depend on them for survival. Teaching them to grow and water a plant will help them understand the need for responsibility for a life. Watering the plants from time to time will help realize the benefit of having a schedule. Like raising a pet or a child, plants need to be cared for and looked after, all while learning the benefits of planting more trees to combat the effects of global warming. Ecosystem Diversity Kits can be a good segue from learning about plants to taking care of them and in turn realizing their worth.

Provide an ecologically conscious future

An ecosystem is the living and non-living things that interact with one another in a specific area. Within ecosystems are smaller habitats, which are the places where living things can meet their basic needs but due to certain human practices such as deforestation, pollution and burning fossil fuels, these ecosystems are at a high risk. While some parts of societies are doing what they can to repair this damage, such as Turkey in the Middle East is globally ranked # 8 for its use of renewable energy, others are not taking this concern seriously. Rising temperatures and the rising sea levels are two sides of the same coin. It is important that we teach the children the importance of an ecologically conscious future for the world.

Learning life skills and problem-solving skills

Through the hands-on experience that the students will have, they will be able to better understand the mechanism involved in a fully functional ecosystem. They will understand how each plant, each animal and each insect play a vital role for the entire ecosystem. A good example of this being the process of pollination and germination in flowers through insects. Children will cultivate the necessary qualities for the real world such as logical thinking, patience, determination and analytical understanding, all of which will benefit them in the future.

A modernized method of teaching will greatly benefit the children including their imagination, understanding and appreciation of the world we live in and the nature we depend upon. Ecosystem Diversity Kits are the next step to cultivating and pointing budding, new and fresher minds to only the stream of scientific study but also for a more responsible tomorrow and a greener world. The Sustainable City in Dubai, is one of the best examples for a greener, more nature-friendly future. We need young minds to innovate and create such incredible ideas into reality and the Building Blocks of Science® 3D: Ecosystem Diversity (©2019) kit is the first step to ensuring that such a future becomes our collective reality.

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The basic skills taught in any educational institute include 3R’s namely; Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. To be able to be good at reading, children first need to learn the letters of the English alphabet. Often there is a confusion between what to teach first, the letter names or the letter sounds. Well let us delve deeper into this topic and help you figure out a solution.

Letter Names vs. Letter Sounds

We are aware that the English alphabet has 26 letters and each letter is identifiable by a name. However, simply knowing the letter names doesn’t help the child read the words correctly or make any meaning out of it. Let’s say for example the word is ‘apple’ and the child hasn’t learnt the letter sounds yet, so he will pronounce the word oddly, much like ‘ay-pee-pee-el- e’. Well that doesn’t sound right!

Let us now understand what are letter sounds. Letterland Phonics is a globally acceptable model to bring phonemic awareness amongst children. As per this concept, though there are only 26 letters, Phonics requires us to learn 44 sounds. The aim is to help children decode the letters into sounds, so that children can read and pronounce the word correctly. These sounds are introduced to the child in a phased manner. And it doesn’t begin from A and end at Z but follows the below pattern:

• Set 1: s, a, t, p
• Set 2: i, n, m, d
• Set 3: g, o, c, k
• Set 4: ck, e, u, r
• Set 5: h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss
• Set 6: j, v, w, x
• Set 7: y, z, zz, qu
• Consonant digraphs: ch, sh, th, ng
• Vowel digraphs: ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er

Matching letters to sounds can help the child come to reading and writing faster and hence knowing ‘letter sounds’ is more important than figuring out letter names. Without knowing the spelling of top if the child tries to read the work and pronounce each sound correctly, he will be able to decode the word /t/ /o/ /p/ without much hassle. Most schools in the UAE as also Dubai, introduce children to Phonics at an early age. Children as young as 3-year-old can begin exploring ‘phonetic sounds’ and come to reading words within 4-5 months of duration.

Some Advantages of Learning Phonics

Research has proved that a systematic approach to learning English through Phonics is way better than any other approaches. The gradual transition from first learning letter sounds, then moving to blending & segmentation, and later understanding tricky words along the way has shown considerable results. Here are some top benefits of learning Phonics:

Builds Reasoning Skills

Phonics enables children to avoid rote learning. Before the introduction of this lovely Phonics methodology, students would be burdened to rote learn the spellings of hundreds of words to be able to come to reading and correlating the spell to the word. Thanks to Phonics, even 4 years olds have the power to reason, comprehend, and apply their knowledge in a systematic manner to quickly come to reading.

Correlation to Printed Symbols Gets Better

Having good phonemic awareness and knowing what rule to apply helps the preschoolers to identify printed symbols, manipulate letter symbols, and use appropriate sounds while reading. Their diction improves and the choice of words they use while talking enhances manifold. Polished language skills go a long way in building confidence and shaping overall personalities of children.

Improves Reading Fluency

Since children already have a good pool of vocabulary by the time they reach Set 4 – Set 5 of the Phonetic lessons, they are able to read most 4-5 letter words and make meaningful connections of sentences in a book. To support the young reader’s learning journey further, Reading Eggs offers lessons, games and e-books to allow children to practice Phonics and apply their skills to become better with each fun activity. Most parents and schools across Middle East & GCC endorse the level of improvement they have seen in children by encouraging them to practice on the Reading Eggs platform.

Sets a Foundation for Learning Grammar

Children can level-up by learning Jolly Phonics Grammar rules. After children have achieved a good hold on basic phonics, they can proceed to learning parts of a speech by signing-up for Jolly Grammar lessons. This helps children be more diversified in language and build their writing skills in a structured manner. The curriculum is designed to include parts of speech, punctuation, tenses past, present, & future, and plurals.

Now that you have a fair understanding of the importance of Phonics, it is advisable to start soon in order to inculcate a love for reading, writing, and verbal comprehension amongst youngsters. You would be further enthused by Phonic lessons when your child happily mimics action sounds and narrates Letterland stories to you.

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