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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Building a business is a complex and layered process. Most adults have a difficult time wrapping their heads across the ways in which a business operates. ‘The Kickstart a Business’ lessons by LEGO® Spike Prime™ Set aim to create a more universal understanding of such business functionalities for young students. This understanding is created with the help of pseudocodes and helps young students build a greater control over real world problem solving. Several institutions in the Middle East urban belt, the GCC, and in cities such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and more in UAE have adopted the lessons for the holistic learning of their students.

The most effective way to solve any problem is to break it down to smaller problems, which then can be addressed individually. The pseudocodes used in the lesson help the students break down actions into different command codes and thus help the student solve a larger problem with simple small solutions for interwoven problems.

Breaking down any problem helps the learner form a greater understanding of the problem while effectively being able to work towards the solution with a holistic approach. The different lessons of the “Kickstart a Business” program focus on different aspects of building programs for problem-solving.

Ensure robot is working correctly

Does learning about quality testing sound intriguing? This is specifically not the case for young learners. But building a flawless robot does sound like an exciting experience. This lesson focuses on helping learners break down the larger problem of delivering quality products into smaller parameters that can be tested and used to determine the ‘quality’ of a product. The students work towards building a program for the robot that in turn takes decisions based on its programming for quality checks. How cool is that!

Identify and fix programming problems

After having covered the creation of the program, it’s the learners turn to learn how to fix something that has already been made. This lesson focuses on finding and fixing mistakes in the code of a delivery cart, so that it can work for the functionality it was made for. This lesson builds the learner’s understanding towards identifying errors and problems. Some may say this is even the most important part of solving a problem, since identification does require a set of skills the lessons aim to teach them. This lesson also assists the learner to develop a native problem-solving mindset, by giving the learner the right tools to identify a problem and work towards its solution.

Recognize patterns and create effective programming

How does a package get tracked while it is on a particular route? How does the mapping of that route happen? How can the operator keep a live track of where the parcel is? All these questions are answered in this lesson program. Using programming stacks an XY tracking bot made to follow a path created by the learner. The lesson focuses on creating the ability of recognising patterns in the learners and enabling them to build effective programs. The lesson helps the learners solidify their understanding of programming blocks while being able to recognise patterns and optimise according to them.

Learn the essence of Digital Security

This lesson enables the students to use programming to lock and unlock the door for a ‘safe deposit’. At this step of the program lesson, the student learns about conditional programming thus learning the basics of programming used in the systems of the world today. The lesson also enables the students to learn about the principles of digital security, in a simplified and straightforward manner.

Discover computational thinking

Automation has come really far in the past decade and the technology to automate almost anything exists. This lesson program helps the student become well versed with the fundamental process of automation. The lesson helps the learner to build a program that identifies and dispatches a parcel based on its color. The learner builds the program to detect colors and dispatch the parcels accordingly.

The program lessons all in all work towards developing a fundamental understanding of coding, problem solving, business execution and more, all done in its most fundamental manners, so as to help more students grasp the idea.

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Have you ever noticed your child getting bored of studying Maths? Well, you can try a new technique to teach them Maths. Bring them to a Supermarket to learn Maths in any of the malls in Dubai. It might sound quite strange to you at first, but it turns out to be a great idea when executed properly.

As much as studying from the notebooks is important, it is also important to develop a practical understanding. So, next time when you plan to go for grocery shopping take your child along, of course after the pandemic is over. Real-life tasks can make learning Maths a better experience!

Add to Cart

You can suggest your child to calculate all the items in your cart and count the total amount. This will improve their math skills. You can purposely add more items and then remove them later. Ask them to then subtract the extra items. This will seem like a challenge to them but they will get used to it and become good at Maths. Even IB schools in UAE/GCC and other parts of the world, have scheduled field visits to encourage on-ground studies and ready children for the outside world.

Choose the Items

When you’re busy choosing the items, give the entire list of items to your child along with the prices and ask them to choose the item which falls within the allocated range. It will give them enough time to compare it and improve their budgeting skills. You can also give them an item which is beyond the range and ask them to instead opt for an alternate item.

Ask them to Multiply

Hand over 3-4 invoices to them from different times when you went grocery shopping and ask them to multiply it. You can also buy the same items but from different brands and ask your child to compare them. After comparing, ask them which brand gives the same product at a lesser price.

Give them Coupons

Many supermarkets run offers like 50% – 70% off and many such offers are valid frequently. So, this can be a great opportunity for you to put your child’s knowledge to work and evaluate how much they’ve learnt. You should ask them to calculate the percentages and check the results.

Tell them your Budget

You should discuss your budget with your child and give them a calculator. Let them make a list of items that have to be bought, by telling them your requirements. Further, let them use a calculator and make a list according to the budget. Explain to them why budgeting is important and how a household is run on fixed monthly budget.

Collection of Change

Let your child collect the change by calculating it. They can go and ask for the amount of change that has to be taken by subtracting it from the total amount. For example, if the amount is 300 dirhams then give your child 500 dirhams and ask them to collect the change. This way, they can do the math and collect the change from the cashier. Children develop a sense of responsibility and become confident every time they are assigned a task and are able to complete it successfully.

Ask them to Help you

Weigh Inform your child how much the fruits and vegetables weigh and tell them the quantity you want. Further, ask them to buy a certain amount of weight, for example, 1 dozen banana. So, they have to estimate how many bananas will come in a dozen and this will teach them the basics of quantity properly.

However, due to the current pandemic there is no option but to stay indoors. So, we recommend you to make the most of the Mathletics platform which aims to make learning maths interesting through its online programs. They have designed programmes for different age group students and quite a few parents in the Middle East find it beneficial to use this tool. Students even get detailed reviews of the tasks that are assigned to them. It will teach and train them on various math concepts like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in a fun-filled way.

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The 21st century that we live in today is witnessing rapid innovation as a result of newer developments in the field of science, technology, engineering and research. In a matter of time, we went from having immobile desktop commuters to using smartphones, tabs and apps. Thanks to cleaning robots, time allocated to household chores is reduced considerably and smart home devices powered by IoT are making safety have taken comfort and safety to new dimensions. Even investing in digital currency called cryptocurrency, is trending with Bitcoin and Ethereum as an alternative to the regular stock exchanges.

In recent times you must have read about the 3D printing technology making headlines and its impressive impact across multiple sectors. From prototyping a small screw to making customized 3D printed polyurethane car seats by German automaker Porsche, the possibilities with are endless. Let us together discover this new-age tool and impact on societies:

Making New Advents in the Field of Medicine

Using the bioprinting technique, it is possible to print layers of living tissues and cells using bio-ink. Through this, doctors are able to replicate human organs and use them for research or as a cheaper alternative to organ transplant. Ongoing studies has led to the development of human body parts for surgery, such as; skin, eyes, ears, and vital organs such as liver & heart. Lifesaving drugs like pills that are 3D printed are already in the market and are safe for consumption. Even prosthetic limbs are 3D printed, giving a new lease of hope to accident victims and diabetic patients. 3D printing is entering the UAE market in a big way and as per news reported, medical products in Dubai is expected to reach AED 1.7 billion by 2025.

Enhancing Efficiency in Manufacturing

The use of 3D printing in manufacturing is becoming widely accepted. Simply by adding layer upon layer of materials such as plastics or metal, 3D printers are able to develop products that are as competent as the output produced under the traditional way of manufacturing. Unlike the traditional technique where a huge team of skilled labor needs to be deployed on machines, operation of 3D printers is enabled by a single person who starts the machine and the rest is all automated. This brings down the labor cost considerably and thereby reduces the cost of production. Another advantage of 3D printing is that the products can be produced as and when required and there is no compulsion to generate goods in batches. Mass production may not always be beneficial, as the items need a place for storage & warehousing, before they are dispatched into the market and this turns out to be costly.

Adding Meaning to Education

Educators are using 3D printers in classrooms to make subjects more relatable and increase student’s involvement. No matter what content you are teaching, 3D printing makes class interesting. Teachers can print 3D shapes for children to touch, feel and visualize their dimensions instead of showing it as a slide on the PowerPoint presentation. Even the study of our solar system, its 8 planets, and movement around the sun is made exciting by 3D printing models. Also, how boring is it to simply remember dates and study about the different historic events from a textbook. To add meaning and visual delight to this mandatory study 3D printing comes to the rescue. Imaging playing the role of an Egyptian prince with the model pyramids and mummies in the background, just printed using the Mayku educational printer. The Mayku FormBox is a compact 3D printer which is a favorite device amongst IBs and CBSE schools in the Middle East, especially in the GCC. It aims to foster a hands-on approach to STEAM learning by encouraging children to design & make their own learning aids.

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