Sugata Mirta: Building a school in the clould.

Reviewed by: Mahmoud Salem.

M.salem.pl@gmail.com.

Supervisor: M. Matysik.

Warsaw University, Poland. 2019.

 Sugata Mitra: Building a school in the cloud.

“What is going to be the future of learning?” with this sentence, Sugata Mitra Started his speech to the TED audience on Feb 27, 2013. He introduced his little story in order to tell what his plan is about, by looking at where the kind of learning we do in the school came from-it came about three hundred years ago, from the last and the biggest of the empires on this plane, The British Empire.

Mr.Mitra explained that the Victorians did not have computers and telephones, but with data hand written on a piece of paper, and travelling by ships, they created a global computer made up of people, which was called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that bureaucratic administrative machine running, they needed many people, and in order to produce these people they created school as we know it. Then he illustrated how these people were identical to each other by knowing three things: they had to have a good handwriting because the data was handwritten, they had to be able to read, and they had to be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head, You could pick one up from New Zealand and ship him to Canada and he would be instantly functional. He noted that the machine no longer exists while we still produce identical people, so he called the current schools obsolete.  He argues that the punishments and examinations seen as threats shut the brain down. Neuroscience provides evidence that, when it is threatened the reptilian part of our brain, it shuts down everything else, including the prefrontal cortex, the parts that learn. He described his own experiments with students. The first one was when he used to teach programming in Delhi, when there was a slum near his office, and he made a hole in the wall next to his office. He stuck a computer inside it, just to see what would happen with the students who had never had a computer, did not know what the internet was, and did not know English.

Eight hours later, he found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse. The second experience was when he repeated the experiment 300 miles out of Delhi, in a remote village, where a chance of finding someone to help the kids was very little. Two months later, he found kids playing games on the computer on their own, and they required from him a faster processor and better mouse, and saw that the kids were able to learn English and computer skills in two months.

His next experiment concerns bringing the creativity back to learning and shifting from threat to pleasure. When he got back to England, he asked 200 British grannies from Diggles, northwestern England, to participate in online teaching one hour a week for students located in Tamil Nadu, India, 6,000 miles away, their encouragement continued to the children’s success in learning. He showed the audience his idea for future of education, i,e. self-organized learning environments, collaboration, and encouragement, based on tapping into the children’s and ability to work together.

I like the way Mr. Mitra started his speech with a question to his audience in order to illustrate his points. I also admire the way he presented the definition of the bureaucratic administrative machine. I think he has a point that we all became identical learners especially from school times, when we all taught the same knowledge globally. However, I do not agree with him when he described the current schools as obsolete, I think the concept of schools is still vital and they are still able to provide the necessary knowledge and experiences for the students; in my opinion it just needs to be updated by implementing the new technology and materials. However, I do not think that the local governments are ready for this update because it is too costly.

Reading his experiments, in general, it was good to try to see how the students can learn by themselves, without a teacher.  Changing the ways of the acquisition of knowledge is fine but we need to ensure the quality of education and create a living space in the classroom where both students and teachers are socially integrated to their society and culture (Altrichter, Helm, and Kanape, 2018).  

References

Altrichter,H. & Helm. C. & Kanape. A. (n.d.). Education and school quality. Retrieved from http://www.sqa.at/pluginfile.php/994/course/section/450/Education%20and%20school%20quality.pdf.

Mitra. S. (2013, 02, 17). Building a school in the cloud. Retrieved from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3jYVe1RGaU

report view

Reviewed by: Mahmoud Salem.

M.salem.pl@gmail.com.

Supervisor: M. Matysik.

Warsaw University, Poland. 2019.

 Sugata Mitra: Building a school in the cloud.

“What is going to be the future of learning?” with this sentence, Sugata Mitra Started his speech to the TED audience on Feb 27, 2013. He introduced his little story in order to tell what his plan is about, by looking at where the kind of learning we do in the school came from-it came about three hundred years ago, from the last and the biggest of the empires on this plane, The British Empire.

Mr.Mitra explained that the Victorians did not have computers and telephones, but with data hand written on a piece of paper, and travelling by ships, they created a global computer made up of people, which was called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that bureaucratic administrative machine running, they needed many people, and in order to produce these people they created school as we know it. Then he illustrated how these people were identical to each other by knowing three things: they had to have a good handwriting because the data was handwritten, they had to be able to read, and they had to be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head, You could pick one up from New Zealand and ship him to Canada and he would be instantly functional. He noted that the machine no longer exists while we still produce identical people, so he called the current schools obsolete.  He argues that the punishments and examinations seen as threats shut the brain down. Neuroscience provides evidence that, when it is threatened the reptilian part of our brain, it shuts down everything else, including the prefrontal cortex, the parts that learn. He described his own experiments with students. The first one was when he used to teach programming in Delhi, when there was a slum near his office, and he made a hole in the wall next to his office. He stuck a computer inside it, just to see what would happen with the students who had never had a computer, did not know what the internet was, and did not know English.

Eight hours later, he found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse. The second experience was when he repeated the experiment 300 miles out of Delhi, in a remote village, where a chance of finding someone to help the kids was very little. Two months later, he found kids playing games on the computer on their own, and they required from him a faster processor and better mouse, and saw that the kids were able to learn English and computer skills in two months.

His next experiment concerns bringing the creativity back to learning and shifting from threat to pleasure. When he got back to England, he asked 200 British grannies from Diggles, northwestern England, to participate in online teaching one hour a week for students located in Tamil Nadu, India, 6,000 miles away, their encouragement continued to the children’s success in learning. He showed the audience his idea for future of education, i,e. self-organized learning environments, collaboration, and encouragement, based on tapping into the children’s and ability to work together.

I like the way Mr. Mitra started his speech with a question to his audience in order to illustrate his points. I also admire the way he presented the definition of the bureaucratic administrative machine. I think he has a point that we all became identical learners especially from school times, when we all taught the same knowledge globally. However, I do not agree with him when he described the current schools as obsolete, I think the concept of schools is still vital and they are still able to provide the necessary knowledge and experiences for the students; in my opinion, it just needs to be updated by implementing the new technology and materials. However, I do not think that the local governments are ready for this update because it is too costly.

Reading his experiments, in general, it was good to try to see how the students can learn by themselves, without a teacher.  Changing the ways of the acquisition of knowledge is fine but we need to ensure the quality of education and create a living space in the classroom where both students and teachers are socially integrated to their society and culture (Altrichter, Helm, and Kanape, 2018).  

References

Altrichter,H. & Helm. C. & Kanape. A. (n.d.). Education and school quality. Retrieved from http://www.sqa.at/pluginfile.php/994/course/section/450/Education%20and%20school%20quality.pdf.

Mitra. S. (2013, 02, 17). Building a school in the cloud. Retrieved from. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3jYVe1RGaU

Teacher - Student Talk

Teacher - Student Talk

On the 17^th of December 2018, and on the 14^th of January 2019, I observed four lessons, with 3rd grader, who usually have six English classes a week, At the first two lessons there were fifteen students, nine girls and six boys, the last class I observed has eleven students, five boys and six girls.

The aim of the lessons was to introduce past simple irregular forms, activities, read about celebrating birthday and discuss it, revising the vocabulary.

The topics of the lessons is the monster under my bed. During my four hours observation I focused on two types of students, active and less active pupils. The active students usually answered a questions addressed to them and a question addressed to the whole class more often, by raising their hands to answer, and sometimes by shouting the answer when they knew it. When teacher talked to whole group or concentrated on someone else, they stayed focus with what teacher said. If they wanted to talk with other students about the tasks or gab between themselves, they usually used their L1, but when they talked to teacher, they used their L2; their body language showed that they were focused on the teacher and they sometimes paid attention to what was going in the class.

Meanwhile the less active students did answer the questions addressed to them by the teacher but sometimes teacher encouraged them, they did not raise their hands more often but when teacher addressed the question to them, they answered. If they knew the answer they raised their hands, when the teacher talked to whole group or concentrated on someone else, they stayed focused with what teacher said. They used L1 language when they wanted to talk with other students, but they used L2 when they talk to the teacher. Their body language showed that they were focused on the teacher but they paid less attention to what was going in the class. 

The teacher always addresses the students by their names when students wanted to answer. The teacher spoke to the students with a warm voice, even when she uses body language in order to help students understand. The teacher corrected the wrong answers of the students but not corrected it directly. She made often students participate and correct it. When a student made an incorrect answer, and if the student answered the question correctly she praised him. In addition, she used encouraging statements like “I am sure you can do it “ for the students who claimed that they can’t achieve or do particular activities. 

The teacher managing time efficiently

 The methods that the teacher use to get students attention vary. Sometimes she does use her body language to show expressions that the students understand as a way of controling the noise in the class, sometimes she use “ 1,2,3 look at me” and “shshsh”. Besides managing time very well for instance, she corrects the exercises of the students while they are listening to a song and singing it. Her instructions are clear with short sentences which make the students understand it easily. 

 She draws lots of pictures on the blackboard in order to explain new vocabulary to students, and sometimes she does speak L1 in order to simplify some words that students may need for their activities. Teacher's talking and her body language are very important during the lesson, I believe that she keeps the class under control and students stay focused on acquiring the knowledge in the proper way, and there is always enough time for less active students to be made concentrated more by the teacher.I would consider teacher's body language and controlling lesson time as an important element for teaching learning strategies, and I hope to be able to do them in a professional way. 

Thank you.

Teaching Materials

On the 14^th of January 2019, I observed four lessons, with 3 rd Grades, who usually have six English lessons a week, the numbers of students in classes usually varied between 11 students and 15 students in each class. The aims of the lessons were for students to be able to write activities on the present past, and writing about their birthday party. they Listened to song, read, and wrote a new verse for the song, using some words from the box. The coursebook used for the 3 rd grads is Our World Students book 3, by the national geography learning. When I asked the teacher about her personal opinion about the book, she said that she liked the book because it has great content and good additional materials for language practice and she added, “You have to support it but not heavily”. When I asked the students about their coursebook, most students liked the coursebook, and they said its fun and easy, meanwhile few students did not like it, one student thought the coursebook was difficult.  Teacher uses "Storyfun " course book by Karen Saxby and " Home Fun Booklet"  for the revised Cambridge English: Young Learners (YLE), by Jane Ritter as other materials to boost and develop kids language.

The teacher started with Pre Task stage when she helped to create a good atmosphere at the beginning of the lesson, she gave the students words and supporting sentences that they used in doing activities in their coursebook and workbook, she supplied the student's words and ideas to support each individual student. Then students started their first activity, which was grammar activity ,they drew a line between the two verb forms in the present and in the past, which took seven minutes including checking. The second activity was from the workbook students were asked to read and draw lines to match the questions and answers, this activity took around ten minutes including teacher's feedback when she discussed the answers with the class. The third activity was listening to the song and filling word gaps, students listened to the song three times, and after they got familiar with the lyrics, they started to fill in the word gaps in their workbook. This exercise took around ten minutes. The last activity was about writing a new verse of the song, using some words from the box, In this activity, students knew the meaning of all words listed in the box and they filled in the gaps easily because they knew how to build a sentence structure.

In the conclusion, materials are very important for the students and for the teacher. It is a fundamental key for teaching and learning, and it must be taken into consideration when it comes to grammar, spelling, pronunciation and vocabulary abilities in order to help them develop their level in English. In addition, the way how the teacher implements the techniques and strategies of teaching in English is not less important than the materials. After taking a look at the topics of the materials and activities, I think I would not change anything in the material but I would probably add some extra activities in case I saw that students did not get some of the crucial concepts right. Thank you.