Engage Your Students with Real-World Projects Webinar

The 12^th of March was the date I attended my first Webinar, I really enjoyed that experience of listening to the lecture while taking notes and sharing some ideas in the chat while also following up with my friend. The Webinar was beneficial as well as the chat that was going there with professionals sharing their experiences and ideas for making projects relevant to students. The presenter "Suzie Boss" began by saying that "the longer students stay in the school, the less engaged they are in the learning process. Among students who describe school as boring, a key complaint is a lack of relevance". The first tip to make students engaged in the project is to make "headlines as a hook", to teach what is currently happening in our community or the world around us but a key for that is to choose or even to show them different topic and let them choose which topics do they find interesting or gets them curious as a basis to design your authentic real world projects. Second tip is to know what makes a project worthy to give time, does it encourage critical thinking? Does it have a long term value? Does it generate a high interest? Could it connect to your standards? Third tip is to design right sized projects that are accessible, actionable, big enough to matter and small enough to tackle, also you have to pay attention to the process; helping students understand the problem deeply, build background knowledge and making meaning of the learning, also to the context by letting students to engage in work outside the classroom and finally the application in which they take what they learn and apply it in some authentic situation, sharing the product with authentic audience and being assessed in some authentic way. Fourth, the project should raise the students Awareness and allow them to raise others awareness, Advocacy by suggesting solutions to some real problems and Action which are the possible outcomes from the meaningful project.  Fifth, you should give students Voice and Choice in how they are going to express their understanding, don't give them the same project you gave the year before, but you should let them choose what they going to advocate for? Which audience do they want to reach? And what type of project do they want to do?. The presenter presented may examples of good real world project as well as the ones who were attending proposed a good projects that worked out.  

Cloud Computing Seminar

Last week I attended a seminar at LIU, the seminar was entitled "Cloud Computing" in which Cloud computing is defined as a type of computing that relies on sharing computing resources rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle applications.  Clouds serve as a modern and more useful replacement for floppy disks, CDs and flash memories. Clouds such as: Google Drive, One Drive, I Cloud and Drop Box, can be used on desktops, mobile phones and tablets allowing easier access and modification for the data at anytime, plus clouding insures a more secure storage of data (no viruses), can save your time  downloading documents since files can be viewed directly from the cloud, and thus reducing the load on your device by allowing more free space and consequently enabling your device to work faster. In the other hand, uploading also will take less time especially if you are sending a file for several emails, then you upload one file and share it with all by providing the link or allowing whom you want to view or edit your file. A very important advantage is that by using a cloud you can print whatever documents you want by only a press without a need to connect wires or to  approach the printer. The drawbacks of this technique, is that that administrators of the clouds can view or even delete your data, but you can avoid this problem by downloading "Boxcryptor" that permits you to put another password to insure that your info won't be accessed