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Indian Education: Standpoint

Originally posted on http://blog.arcanemind.com/arcanemind/indian-education-standpoint/ -- Please visit: www.arcanemind.com

Indian Education: Standpoint

Nowadays Indian education has boiled down to cram up and vomit on the paper (pun intended!). So where did this problem arise from? This didn’t happen over a night and was most definitely not conjured out of thin air by a wand swinging ‘Wizard from Hogwarts’.

This problem arose form the attitude of Indian educators towards new teaching methods and negligence of government in regulating this sector properly. This system of education was created by the, then ruling 40,000 Britishers to churn out clerks and other lower level officers to help run a country of 40 million Indians. And sadly not much has changed, except the fact that it has been turned into a money printing mint.

Once we were called ‘Jagatguru‘. How did we get ourselves demoted from being the premier education hub to minting plant? The answer is very simple, our educators neither endorse nor encourage any form of visible education reform. It’s high time we let go of that timid mentality and take some radical measures to up root this problem.

The easiest way to achieve this is via transition from traditional to project-based learning. But here are some facts to embrace from our buddy Tom Vander Arc before seriously considering this solution.

Tom says, “It’s easy to do, project-based learning it’s just hard to do it well.” Project-based learning is a great way to engage students, to encourage collaboration and creativity, and to promote authentic work and assessment. But it’s hard to:

set a high bar for high quality project deliverables;

assess projects objectively especially when they’re all

help students with low level skills engage in challenging

mitigate the free rider problem of loafing team

provide enough but not too much formative feedback and support;

avoid big knowledge gaps resulting from a string of projects.

Once we find solutions to these issues we can go and reclaim out true seat of education, and be rightfully called ‘Jagatguru‘ again.

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THE REALITY OF ED-TECH!

Originally posted on http://blog.arcanemind.com/arcanemind/the-reality-of-ed-tech/ -- Please visit: www.arcanemind.com

THE REALITY OF ED-TECH!

In the modern age, every sphere has been touched by technology and education hasn’t been left behind in the process. The effort to automate processes to increase efficiency and productivity is common occurrence. The government, too, is promoting Digital India to leverage the use of technology. The inception of Ed-Tech can be traced back to a decade ago and owes its acceptance worldwide for varied reasons such as wider and faster reach, ability to cater to different learning styles, ability to keep the engagement alive, easy update of resource material, to name a few.

Although the general belief is that Ed-Tech is changing the face of education for the better and is likely to be a sustainable model of development in the area with blended teaching, tracking of student learning, advent of learning apps etc. But the more important question is, are the facilitators of education trained and ready to take aid of the fast growing changes in technology? Have they been trained enough to be able to use it to the best of its ability to transcend current learning levels?

There is no doubt that use of technology has many benefits over traditional black board methods. Slides, Smart boards, learning videos, personalized learning programs are a few examples of tools used in India. But how well have the people who are in the classroom, using technology to further education, been able to put it to its optimal use.

For example, can use of slides in the form of projection be called use of technology? Technically, Yes! But is it really helping students remember better when the same information that was on the blackboard is now projected in front of them? How does this medium of instruction motivate students to know more or ask the right questions or encourage them to study? In fact it is as easy to disengage from a projector, as it is with a blackboard.

Hence, we need to take a step back and ensure the people using technology in classrooms have been trained and are comfortable with it. Before that is done, merely using technology as a standalone solution may not reach its full potential in making children ‘Learn with Understanding’.

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Preparing Teachers for 21st-Century Learning

Originally posted on http://blog.arcanemind.com/arcanemind/teaching-with-leadership/ -- Please visit: www.arcanemind.com

Preparing Teachers for 21st-Century Learning

Whether in elementary, secondary or college classrooms, many teachers have begun using open educational resources (OER) as an integral part of day-to-day learning. However, just as no two students are the same, neither are any two teachers.

The challenge with OER is that although the concept of freely accessible, openly licensed resources has been around since 2002, different states, districts, schools and teachers have transitioned to using them at different rates–or potentially not at all. The margin is wide.

Many schools, such as the Open High School of Utah, operate by utilizing a curriculum that consists 90% of OER. The school’s founder, David Wiley, explained that content is delivered completely online and made available to students 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Utilizing personalized learning to the fullest, schools like the Open High School of Utah are pioneers in the technological shift in education. While this and similar institutions are well established and functioning effectively, not all schools are advancing at the same pace.

Paper or Technology?

According to a data report in The Journal, paper notebooks are very much a thing of the past, and school-provided technology is available at more and more institutions. The report findings show that:

In 2014, 33% of all high-school students used school-issued mobile devices.

Additionally, 66% of middle- and high-school students had access to a laptop.

An average of 56% of both groups had access to tablets.

Largely, this technology is providing the majority of students in these age brackets with the ability to access information through online portals. However, much lower percentages of students are using this technology to read online textbooks or watch teacher-created videos.

How are teachers being developed to use educational technology in a way that best supports a student’s ability to learn?

Assuming that teachers have begun utilizing technology, determining exactly how to do so can quickly produce a new barrier. The struggle to find ideal OER to use in the classroom was once an issue because of the limited number of resources available, and while this issue should phase itself out as more and more resources become available, the struggle then morphs into a new issue: OER can be overwhelming.In a perfect world, when a teacher identifies a gap that a new resource could fill, the creation of a new resource could solve the problem.

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Why Online Education Is Growing At Top Universities

Originally posted on http://blog.arcanemind.com/arcanemind/why-online-education-is-growing-at-top-universities/ -- Please visit: www.arcanemind.com

Why Online Education Is Growing At Top Universities

The reason why online education grows is clear to us today. It’s cheaper, it’s convenient, it helps you move beyond the foursquare system, and offers you an option to build a network throughout the world. Moreover, it’s encouraging lifelong learning and enhancing higher qualifications, notwithstanding predicaments from physical to geological. So, enrollment for online classes has ballooned within the last few years and it’s everywhere now.

In brief, the main reasons behind the mounting popularity are:

-Everybody is eager to boost the intellectual property to keep pace with the rising demand.

-Campus learning that keeps you engaged from 9-5 isn’t a good choice anymore.

-People don’t prefer making sacrifices in professional and personal commitments for the sake of knowledge.

-Employer-based courses offered through online learning is helping to enhance the workforce.

And now, it has evolved with options like:

 1) Video conferences and video instructions to enhance an engaging learning atmosphere.

2) Free access to study materials making knowledge available anywhere in the world.

3) Online platforms through which a programme can be tailored according to preferences.

4) Online tools to discuss, debate on and include comments on any recent topic are encouraging independent ideas. Rapid and better connection with the educators and peers for an effective educational environment.

Bonus: Learn courses on Interview Preparation on Arcanemind.com, You can use a coupon code ” GIVE50 ” to get 50% discount on any of the courses. – Click here forInterview Preparation course list So, no need to visit campus anymore?

But the growing fame of online courses isn’t making the experts happy. The trend of acquiring knowledge through machines and technology is slowly eliminating the human element from the entire process of learning and teaching. A computer can never be equivalent to a teacher. Human guidance, which actually helps to groom the personality of learners, will disappear completely if online learning becomes a mainstream practice.  So, what’s the solution?

Whether the online classes are able to address the sustainability issues, deliver qualitative knowledge and guide you through a right career path are not relevant at this time, it is quite clear that the facilities and freedom they are offering is being preferred over traditional form of learning. So, quite a few measures have to be taken on urgent basis to save universities.

A fair deal is immediately required. Students have been spending fortunes for university courses. Higher learning is a financial burden to most of the families. The problem of loan debts is increasing in every nation. Learners today, want to get rid of expenses. If accreditation is available at an affordable price at home, a few would care to set foot on campus.

Adopting practical methods are essential for universities. Blending the advantages of various learning approaches is an intelligent way to encourage campus education. Wasting a great amount of productive time on campus to earn a degree doesn’t seem viable to many.

Adding an online curriculum to the syllabus is a great decision as they open many options to develop a better communication between the educators and learners. Moreover, including technological equipments can help building an engaging learning environment.

Opening more professional and employer-based courses is important. Most of the learners are choosing to enhance qualifications to maximize their career opportunities. So, the courses relevant to the market and employers make them happy.

Including some exclusive attractions besides reducing costs is also important. This inclusion must add facilities on campuses that are able to contend online offerings and will successfully draw students’ attention toward residential education. Welcome change! It’s necessary to accept that open university courses online are getting attention from the new age learners for quite a few reasons. So, opening an online option will not only enhance enrollment but help the universities reach a wider section of academic aspirers. Hence it will expand the service and also the goodwill of the university.

Bonus: Learn courses on Interview Preparation on Arcanemind.com, You can use a coupon code ” GIVE50 ” to get 50% discount on any of the courses. – Click here forInterview Preparation course list  

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15 Tips to Grow a Social-Media Audience for Your Startup

Originally posted on http://blog.arcanemind.com/arcanemind/15-tips-to-grow-a-social-media-audience-for-your-startup/ -- Please visit: www.arcanemind.com

15 Tips to Grow a Social-Media Audience for Your Startup

  Here are 15 tips for growing your startup’s audience on the three top social networks, starting with strategies common to all of them:

1. Create strong social profiles and pages.

The starting point for growing your audience on any social network is strong profiles and pages for your social accounts. This requires including branded cover photos and profile photos. It also requires filling out all of your details. On Twitter, that’s as simple as a 160-character bio, website link and location. Facebook wants a short description, website link, address and phone number. In short, fill out as many fields for your social profiles and pages as you can.

Next, share a few updates (five to ten) before you start your quest to build an audience. This will give people who visit your social accounts a reason to follow you. If you don’t know what to post, do the following:

2. Share quality content.

Even before your startup gets going fully, start building your audience on most networks by sharing content your target audience will enjoy. For example, if you have a startup for a Facebook marketing tool, start sharing content about Facebook. That could mean blog content, podcasts, videos, presentations, infographics, etc., created by you or by others.

3. Use friend-finding features.

Most networks have a way to connect you with people you know. Twitter allows you to search email contacts, Facebook allows you to search email contacts and utilize an advanced people search. Instagram guides you to your Facebook friends on Instagram in its app. LinkedIn allows you tosearch your email contacts and suggests current and former classmates and work colleagues based on your profile information.

4. Add links to your top social accounts on your website.

You can do this by adding small square social network icons to your website’s header, footer and sidebar. You can also add the official buttons for each network on your website. You can find the official brand assets, buttons, badges and widgets on Facebook (brand assets and button generator), Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You can also look into social network icons on stock image sites like DepositPhotos.

Bonus: Learn courses on Interview Preparation on Arcanemind.com, You can use a coupon code ” GIVE50 ” to get 50% discount on any of the courses. – Click here forInterview Preparation course list

5. Add links to your top social accounts to your email signatures.

Make sure that everyone you communicate with via email knows about your startup, by adding links to your top social accounts in your email signature. You can do this using small square social network icons or standard text links. You can also use services like WiseStamp to create professional signatures with your social links.

6. Cross-promote your social accounts.

Already have a large audience on one account? Ask its members to connect with you on another. That will be as simple as sending a tweet to your Twitter followers asking if they are on Pinterest, and if they are, they should follow you there, too.

Also look for opportunities to link from one social account to another. Pinterest, for example, will allow you to link to Twitter and Facebook.Woobox, a Facebook app maker, has apps that allow you to add tabs to your Facebook page for Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest for free.

7. Follow your target Twitter audience and engage with them.

Twitter allows you to follow up to 5,000 people. You can follow more after people start to follow you. When you follow people on Twitter, they get a notification that they are being followed. In addition to following people, start chatting with them.

Use Twitter Search to find people that match your target audience. Twitter will search keywords in people’s bios as well as their tweets. When you see a tweet from someone that you can reply to, do it. If people like your reply, they just might follow you back.

8. Use Twitter advertising.

If you have an advertising budget, try Twitter advertising. Twitter will promote your account to your target audience members to encourage them to follow you.

9. Use your Facebook page to ‘like’ other pages.

If you click on the drop-down arrow next to your photo at the top right of your Facebook dashboard, you have the option to use Facebook as your page by selecting it from the list. This will allow you to ‘like’ other Facebook pages as your page and comment on them. Find pages where your target audience are engaged and start communicating with them with your page.

10. Open your profile up to Facebook followers.

Facebook has a setting that you can enable to allow others to follow your personal profile. Any public updates you share will be shared with your followers in the news feed without your having to accept them as a friend. This will help you grow an audience that you can promote your business to while keeping your private things private.

11. Participate in Facebook groups.

Another way to utilize your personal profile on Facebook is to engage in groups related to your niche. Find groups your target audience would be interested in, join them and start engaging in the discussions.

12. Follow others on Twitter.

As happens with Twitter, when you follow other people on Instagram, they will be notified. You can find your target audience by searching for hashtags they would likely use when they post on Instagram. Then follow people and engage with them by commenting on their photos and videos in the news feed.

13. Use hashtags on Twitter.

When you share photos and videos, be sure to use hashtags in your captions. Hashtags are utilized by Instagram users to find visual content on specific topics. As people come across your photos and videos in a hashtag stream, they will be able to click a button next to your name to follow you.

14. Participate in LinkedIn groups.

LinkedIn groups are great for engaging with other active LinkedIn members. Participate in the discussions and provide valuable answers to get people to want to connect with you.

15. Comment on LinkedIn’s blog posts.

LinkedIn allows members to post blogs, and some of those members have thousands of followers. Find people in your niche with lots of followers, follow their latest posts and engage with your target audience in the comments of those posts.

Bonus: Learn courses on Interview Preparation on Arcanemind.com, You can use a coupon code ” GIVE50 ” to get 50% discount on any of the courses. – Click here forInterview Preparation course list

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Tips And Strageties For Those Preparing For The GRE

Originally posted on http://blog.arcanemind.com/arcanemind/tips-and-strageties-for-those-preparing-for-the-gre/ -- Please visit: www.arcanemind.com

Tips And Strageties For Those Preparing For The GRE

The GRE stands for Graduate Record Examination and is the exam by which most universities in the United States judge a candidate’s qualification into a graduate program. The GRE tests vocabulary, reading comprehension, text completion, mathematical abilities (ranging from geometry to algebra to numeric problem solving) and writing. There are very few graduate programs in the United States which one can enter into without having taken the GRE (with the exception of business schools, which tend to prefer the GMAT). Therefore, adequate preparation for the exam is essential. Read on for the best GRE preparation tips.

Familiarize Yourself

Before taking a practice test, simply look through each section of the GRE and get a feel for what the content is going to be and how the test is going to work. There are three sections: Verbal Reasoning, Quantitative Reasoning and Analytical Writing. You can familiarize yourself with the questions online, through a website like ETS, or by purchasing or borrowing a GRE test preparation book from your local bookstore or library.

Additionally, familiarize yourself with the scoring process. Realize that it’s not a simple +1/-1 system for correct/incorrect answers. Rather, your score is assessed by the difficulty of questions answered, and the questions will either get easier or harder depending on how you’re doing as you move through the test. More correct answers on more difficult questions will yield a higher score.

  Take a Practice Test…

…a real one, where you have a timer and move through the material exactly how you would on test day. Kaplan and the Princeton Review both offer practice tests in their study books and online. Most universities also have GRE courses you can sign up for just to take a practice exam through the university’s testing center. As you take the test, pace yourself. Take your time with the questions, and don’t worry about answers that you don’t know. If you can’t make a good guess, skip it, and move on. After you take the test, review the questions that you missed and the ones you excelled at, familiarizing yourself with your strengths and weaknesses.

Study

Now that you’ve taken a practice test and familiarized yourself with the content on the test, you should have a pretty good idea of what you need to review. Make flashcards; use online resources; have a friend quiz you on vocabulary; or get a tutor. Again, Kaplan and the Princeton Review both offer GRE preparatory courses and tutors if you need them. If your quantitative score is low, ask a friend or family member for study help, or use your university’s tutoring center.

For vocabulary practice, one of the best things you can do is read. Read your local newspaper or books of literary merit. If you come to a word you don’t know, look it up. Find essay prompts from previous years, and write practice essays. Then compare your response to answers that have been published. Ask a friend or professor to read over your essay, assessing it for grammatical, spelling or sentence structure errors. Become confident in your ability to master the content.

On test day, eat a good breakfast; get a good night’s sleep, and go into the testing center prepared and ready to excel!

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Scaling Up Courses

Originally posted on http://blog.arcanemind.com/arcanemind/809/ -- Please visit: www.arcanemind.com

Scaling Up Courses

With the new semester upon us, many people are getting ready to try out new course preps or revisit familiar classes. The too-brief break of the holiday season doesn’t provide much time for preparation, so find the last days before the semester begins can be a frantic time for revision and planning. we have previously addressed strategies for revising a past course, which can be particularly helpful if the dynamics of the course remain generally the same. However, increasing demands on universities for larger classes and different modalities (includingfully-online courses) mean that often we face the task of scaling up a syllabus.

Revising a course to accommodate additional bodies (whether 10 or 100) is not as simple as changing the classroom, although it may appear that way in the course catalog.

Here are a few of the steps to follow

Eliminate assignments that have low return on investment. If a course size is increasing dramatically, we find it helpful to be merciless with assignments. It’s better to provide meaningful feedback on fewer, essential, assignments than to dilute time and feedback by providing too many projects for assessment. If an exercise is important for learning but doesn’t necessarily require detailed feedback, consider switching it to a participation or completion grade.

Consider peer review for early stages of assessment where possible. While giving detailed feedback on iterative versions of projects (whether written, coded, or otherwise) can be ideal, it can become prohibitive at certain class sizes. Using course management systems tools for peer review or providing time in-class for immediate peer feedback can be a good solution for early stages of projects.

Examine the benefits of individual versus team projects. In project-driven courses, deciding whether to require collaboration or focus on individual work can be an essential decision. Individual work by necessity means more time spent grading and giving feedback, but team work can present other problems (particularly when teams hit problems with missing members and inconsistent contributions)

Anticipate questions and provide supplementary materials.  one of the most challenging aspects of teaching larger classes can be answering constant emails (particularly with technical questions, which can be numerous in my field.) we should take questions from last  teaching  course and use them to create FAQ pages for projects, which can then be a first resource on the course management system.

Streamline grading and rubrics where appropriate. Using rubrics with pre-written comments for common challenges can save time and energy, which we find leaves us free to spend  time writing comments on unique aspects of student’s projects or providing suggestions for future improvement.

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Republic Day Contest

Originally posted on http://blog.arcanemind.com/arcanemind/republicday/ -- Please visit: www.arcanemind.com

Republic Day Contest

On the occasion of 67th Republic Day, we proudly announce our next blockbuster competition

click on the link http://arcanemind.com/republicday/

Answer simple the questions.

Enter your Name and email ID at last.

 Win a chance to get free merchandise stuff and Win coupons worth Rs.10,000/-