Educating Children

Japan to boost education support for non-native children

Noticias

Asia/ Japan/ 16.07.2019/ Source: asia.nikkei.com.

 

Japan will provide more support for educating children of foreign nationals from early childhood through high school, including by increasing Japanese-language classes, under a plan released Monday.

The education ministry’s proposals follow changes in April to immigration law that allow certain foreign workers to bring family with them to Japan. Schools had already been facing a rise in students learning Japanese as a second language, prompting criticism that efforts on this front were lagging.

Monday’s plan, which calls for working «to ensure that all children of foreign nationals have educational opportunities,» seeks to provide seamless support to learners from preschoolers to job-seeking international students.

It proposes multi-language guides to ensure parents have information on how to enroll students at kindergartens and elementary schools.

Public schools are to receive more teachers for Japanese as a second language as well as aides who speak the languages of foreign students. Some schools currently have no such staff. Regions with a shortage of human resources will use translation and distance-learning systems.

Public high schools will be asked to give special considerations for Japanese-language learners when taking admissions tests, such as making it easier to read kanji characters and allowing the children to bring dictionaries into the exam rooms.

The ministry proposes creating an evening middle school program in every prefecture and major city for those who could not receive compulsory education in their home countries.

The initiative also will help international students in higher education find jobs in Japan, proposing the certification of collaboration programs between universities and businesses.

The plan covers Japanese-language learners of all ages.A 14-language online curriculum for self-study will be developed for residents of areas that lack easy access to Japanese-language classes

Source of the notice: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Japan-immigration/Japan-to-boost-education-support-for-non-native-children2

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Schools can’t be substitute parents, Ofsted chief warns

Michael Savage

By: Michael Saavage. 

Issues such as obesity are better handled in the home, says Amanda Spielman

Parents must not “abdicate their responsibility” by expecting schools to solve all the major problems children face, the chief inspector for schools will warn this week.

In a robust intervention attacking the increasing burdens placed on teachers, Ofsted chief Amanda Spielman will say schools “cannot be a panacea” for all social ills and will criticise some parents for neglecting some of the “most basic of parenting tasks”, such as toilet training.

While teachers “can play a role” in educating children about the dangers of knife crime and obesity, primary responsibility for these complex problems lies elsewhere, she will warn. When it comes to keeping to a healthy weight, she will say, “schools cannot take over the role of health professionals – and above all parents”.

In a speech marking the publication of her second annual Ofsted report, Spielman will say: “Our education and care services don’t exist in isolation from the local areas they serve. They are and should be a central part of our communities. But being part of a community means being very clear what your responsibilities are, and what issues, however worthy, can only be tackled beyond the school, college or nursery gates.”

Knife crime will be singled out as one of the most recent issues to place an additional burden on schools. “Most of our schools are safe, and we fully support measures, including zero-tolerance policies on the carrying of knives, to keep them that way,” Spielman will say. “But beyond that, while schools can play a role in educating young people about the danger of knives, they cannot be a panacea for this particular societal ill.

“Instead, preventing knife crime requires all local safeguarding partners to work together to protect children from harm while the relevant agencies tackle criminal activity and bring to justice youths and adults who cause harm to children.” Spielman said the obesity crisis was also “an issue which sits largely beyond the school gates”.

“Schools can and should teach children about the importance of healthy eating and exercise … their PE lessons should get them out of breath.

“But beyond that, schools cannot take over the role of health professionals – and above all parents. The answer to the obesity crisis, particularly among younger children, lies in the home, and parents should not abdicate their responsibility here.”

By the start of primary school, almost a quarter of children in England are overweight or obese, and the proportion rises to more than a third by the time they leave for secondary school. However, research by Ofsted has found no pattern to suggest that, on their own, interventions at school can be linked to a direct and measurable impact on weight.

Spielman will also chastise parents who allow their children to reach school without being toilet-trained. It comes amid growing evidence of children arriving at reception unable to use a toilet. “This is difficult for teachers, disruptive for other children and has a terrible social impact on the children affected,” she will say. “This is wrong. Toilet-training is the role of parents and carers, and should not be left to schools. Only in the most extreme cases should parents be excused from this most basic of parenting tasks.”

Spielman’s comments represent a blunt message to ministers keen to tackle topical issues by placing more responsibilities on schools even as they face cuts to resources in the face of austerity. Over the summer the Home Office issued lesson plans for children as young as 11 about the dangers of knife crime, which would involve them being told it is a “myth” that they will be safer with a weapon.

Plans were also announced to educate teachers on related slang.

Children’s minister Nadhim Zahawi said the lesson plans would “help illustrate the real impact of knife crime on young people’s lives” and that schools “up and down the country are taking advantage of them”. With evidence that the average age of knife crime victims is falling, some NHS doctors have called for school exit times to be staggered to reduce the chances of clashes.

There have been major concerns about teachers’ workloads and the impact on the numbers staying in the job. The Department for Education recently pledged to ease pressures on teachers in England after a report blamed an “audit culture” for causing stress among staff.

Source of the article: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/dec/02/schools-parents-ofsted-knife-crime-obesity
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China: New platform to inspire children to become the future building blocks of technology development

Noticias

China/By Yang Meiping / Source: https://www.shine.cn

Chinese corporations are looking into new ways of educating children in technology development as the nation strives to become a world leader in artificial intelligence and coding sectors.

Most children are familiar with computers, tablets and smartphones and play digital games on them. Some of those children have gone further than any of their peers and even are able to create games and apps. Yuma Soerianto, a 10-year-old from Australia, has created six apps and became the youngest attendee at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last year.

Inspired by Soerianto’s achievements, some companies are now trying to cultivate such ability in every child. Shenzhen DianMao Technology Co Ltd is taking the baton with its web-based education platform called Codemao. It includes a series of applications of teaching coding and programming to children.

Li Tianchi, the co-founder and CEO of Codemao, said he and his partner Sun Yue started the company in 2015 when they noticed that some countries have already added coding subject in their school curricula. Meanwhile, the demand in China also grows rapidly due to technology development, such as artificial intelligence and the Internet.

“The world will need more new talent as computer or AI can replace human beings to some extent. Therefore, people should learn coding to make computers or AI work for us, rather than letting them manipulate us,” Li said. “Coding skill will be a basic and essential tool in the future as an international talent. For example, if a journalist can write a program to sort out data and analyze it for a financial issue, it will be more efficient for he/she to work out a report.”

The efficiency of AI has already been widely proved and began to influence lots of areas. For example, Goldman Sachs Group has laid off hundreds of traders in the past few years because of the adoption of computer programs.

According to Li, coding is becoming a basic subject for students, which has been put into primary curriculum in America and some European countries.

China’s state council also released an notification last year, requiring schools to incorporate coding into computer course. It also encourages social forces to develop interesting learning tools for coding education.

Li believes that, although China has begun to popularize computer education since the 1980s, coding education has not been fully developed yet.

Decades back, computer lessons focused on basic skills and knowledge such as document processing.

Since 2000, Computer and Information has become a compulsory course for students, but the focus was still on learning to use existing software, such as Microsoft and Internet Explorer.

“It was about how to work a computer, not how a computer works and how to make it work for us,” said Li. “Only after 2008, coding tools started to enter primary education.”

The difficulty in promoting coding education is because there are only a small number of qualified teachers who know both coding and education.

“It’s not a problem only in China, but worldwide, as outstanding computer professionals are sought by companies with high salaries. Schools could not offer that high payment,” said Li. “Meanwhile, the traditional programming code and tools are difficult for students and even primary school teachers to learn.”

However, the difficulty brought an opportunity for Li and his partner. They are professionals in computers and programming and have invited experts from education and cognitive psychology to create Codemao together — a platform designed on the learning characteristics of children. The aim is to make coding as simple and interesting as building blocks for children.

Based on Chinese national curriculum on computers, it divides its teaching system into nine levels.

It starts with teaching kindergarten or primary school students the basic ideas of coding through game-playing experience, with guidance from cartoon characters and graphic instruction options shaped like blocks. Then it gradually grows into algorithms, data structure and programming languages.

“On our platform, kids can learn to design graphic changes at the very beginning and then create simple games, such as whack-a-mole,” said Li. “When they finish all the nine levels, they will be capable of building and managing big databases and developing large-scale websites.

“We estimated that most students expect to spend approximately 10 years to go through the nine levels, but some students can learn surprisingly fast when their learning motive and potential are triggered. Thus, I think some will finish the nine levels in advance.”

Li pointed out that learning coding languages is not the ultimate goal when learning computation algorithms and creating games, animations and other programs. Students are also learning logical thinking and learning how to apply their knowledge to physics, archaeology, aerospace and other subjects.

“They are no longer addicts to online games, but learners, thinkers and creators,” he said.

There are free prerecorded online courses on the platform, one-to-one courses by teachers offline and an AI system that can answer questions from students and debug students’ work. Offline activities are organized during summer and winter vacations for themed coding learning, and famous coders from home and abroad are also invited to give lecture.

More than 2 million students from more than 3,000 schools, and some off-campus training organizations in China, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Russia, Australia, South Africa, UK and France are now using the platform, according to Li.

Apart from teaching students, Li’s company also trains teachers to benefit more kids. It’s now cooperating with famous universities, such as Shanghai Normal University and Beijing Normal University, to deliver courses to embed coding and coding education ability in future teachers.

In less developed areas, it’s also cooperating with training schools to set up joint programs to cultivate coding education teachers.

It is also going to set up a research center in Finland to study issues including coding and interdisciplinary education, such as STEAM, a task-oriented education approach that guides students to solve real problems combining knowledge of science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics.

“We would like to transfer our research findings into applications to improve our products and provide better education for children,” said Li.

The company has won many startup and innovation rewards and attracted US$18 million of financing, the highest amount K12 code education area .The two founders were listed on the “30 under 30 Asia” ranking, and 30 elites under 30 years old in Asia.

Source:

https://www.shine.cn/archive/feature/education/New-platform-to-inspire-children-to-become-the-future-building-blocks-of-technology-development/shdaily.shtml

 

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