Noor

Today at the Hilton Hotel the second day of the Sixth Annual Symposium is being held. This Symposium is about Learning and Technology meaning: the way that technology is helping with learning these days.

Technology- say for instance a computer, you can search for anything needed but with the help of the internet which is another piece of ingenious technology.

Students can use the information given on the internet and then type it. There is a bonus you can check all of your work with the inbuilt spelling and punctuation checking and also a dictionary and thesaurus if needed.

With internet we can connect to the World Wide Web for answers of all our questions. There is also email and mobile phone which allows students to keep in touch with their teachers and classmates when they are away.

For younger children there are games that are fun and entertaining, yet they are at the same time educational.

At this symposium there are a lot of booths all of different things from a Lindt Chocolate booth to a Microsoft booth. Booths from universities, colleges and schools for children there are also people from hospitals, all advertising and handing out brochures to help promote and get more people to apply for their business, company, college, university or school. At this symposium I have had a lot of fun, met new people, made new friends and learnt more about the technology in and of Saudi Arabia.

By the way my Dad works at the college as a professor.

“If we can do it…”

Mona





“…so can you”

Ummah Films star Baba Ali and his right hand Yusuf Chowdhury talked to a room of guests about “Publishing Videos on the Internet” since although not professionals are very experienced in the field.

They discussed some of the planning needed to be done before actually uploading a video onto the internet:

• Objective- why do you want to make videos?


• Topic- this must be analysed by establishing who the audience is (young, old, students, professionals, beginners/experts in a field etc)? And what does this selected audience want to see?


• Relevant Issues- it will be a waste of time if you record something that has no relevance, in order to create a relevant issue there needs to be a relation with the audience to connect with, something that has a meaning to them.


• Ideas- write things down as soon as you get them

The speakers were very good at keeping the audience engaged and were very supportive of us actually going forth and creating videos, a quote by Baba Ali “I started while sitting in a chair in front of a camera, all of you here today are sitting in a chair with a camera in front of you” they both also insisted how they are not professionals and learnt his along the way. Baba Ali had no idea that his first video would cause such a snowball effect.

Publishing videos online is a great way to voice your opinion, especially when you have something to say but not in the position to say it in, you can send a message to any figure or group or humanity as whole by just recording yourself and letting it be seen by whoever will be interested in the topic.

From this session I learnt that anything is possible, nothing should stop you because the internet has so much information that you can gain any form of knowledge and do what you want to pursue with help and support from others.

See me soon in a monitor screen near you!

I tunes

Sara

This lecture was given by Mr. Mohammad Minyani he is the one who introduced Apple (Macintosh) into the companies around Saudi Arabia.

He spoke about mobile learning and itunes which is an application that works directly with MP3 players. People can download audio and video based upon a variety of interest (music, news, educational lectures, movies, etc.) from this store.

Specifically, iTunes is beneficial to mobile learning, because it is facilitating the ability to distribute information to mobile devices from anywhere in the world. He gave an example of one person he knows that learned the English language from the iPod based upon getting lessons from iTunes.

Maybe I can ask my parents for an upgrade to my iPod if I say that I can get something educational out it!

Moreover, he talked about the broadcast (podcast) where downloading is used in a very practical way. You can learn about almost any subject on the go and search about what you want to learn though iTunes U. Then download it from iTunes to the iPod. There are a number of broadcasts in both English and Arabic. iTunes U is a new style of education that I might really be able to get into.

Building Circuits

Sara A

This was a pretty technical workshop. The speaker Dr. Michael Kaltoi gave an explanation about how to build a simple circuit. The interesting part was that he used a 3D Multimedia Simulation to teach this process.

Some examples were given to show how these circuits worked and how they looked like in real life. The process of “how to build a simple circuit” was all based upon an application where you can simulate the process see if it works on screen and then build it in real life. Cool Stuff!

Students can really benefit from doing this type of applied work.

Committee work:

Ahdab

I volunteered to work with the registration committee. This is one of the most fundamental jobs at L&T Symposium.

The team was incredibly amazing and full of hard worker whether males or females.

They were ready at all times to serve L&T , they even offered services even if they were not asked to do them.

This is the first time that I worked this hard in registration, particularly in events as big as the L&T. I'm also sharing my duty as a blogger which was a great opportunity to experience this aspect of technology. Thanks to Dr. Emet Laboone.

L&T and registration enabled me to see Queen Rania Al Abdullah!! And of course meet old friends and school teachers.

At the end, I interviewed my old school teacher. She gave some pretty positive feedback about the symposium and the information that the symposium provided.

That made us and me, especially, recognize that we have (Effat College Team) really done something.

Although there were many obstacles, especially technical ones with printers, PCs and electricity, we managed every single issue in such an efficient manner that we still appeared professional.

So thanks, to the most amazing team and thanks to our lovely Effat College for allowing us students to work, share and participate in such a huge event.

Online exams' assessment

Ahdab

Assessment is an essential aspect of the learning process. Dr. Rafael Lami Dozo presented this topic in one of L & T's workshops. Assessments can be exams or measurements.

He emphasized the importance of online assessment which reaches all types and mental levels of people. The main purpose of assessments is to serve educating students in coordination with the needs of the society (just like what Dr. Arwa al Aama emphasized). Dr. Rafael included some questions during his session and that is an important action to take in classrooms to maintain concentration level of student and make sure they're awake and alert.

Exams might contain subjective or objective questions or a mixture of both. But, what depends most is what the instructor want to measure analytic abilities, memory or reflection, not that they make an online assessment (type of measurement over type of technology).

Organic Education

Sara A

This was a very interesting lecture given by Hugh Osborn, I liked it very much because the discussion was about the 21^st century solutions. Mr. Osborn provided an explanation about the under performing system in the U.S.A and discussed solutions that focus on creativity. Moreover, he discussed the global imperative force and a comparison between the 19th century model and the 21st century model.

One of the main points he made was about organic agents and "the connection being very powerful as time goes by" and he said that "Google is an organic help education".

He also talked about the universal model that student's self organize when they go to the Internet, but unfortunately on the other hand imaginative play time for children is almost non-existent.

Then before coming to the end, he talked about some goals. He said "achievement must be through academics" where "soft-skills will lead to motivation and working in groups"; then innovation comes into place. The universal model will include leadership where "everybody is a teacher and student".

Finally, he talked about the organic education in the U.S.A (North Carolina) and showed the results of the organic education model. He explained how to go from organic to mechanistic schools. He talked about the gifted children who were given intense education and how the teachers there are innovators.

When it comes to how the students receive information he said "there is no structure for text books because teachers are using the books as references only and children don't know what a test is until they actually take it". He also said that "children will become trouble makers if the shift will be from organic to mechanistic education".