Burundis push for universal education

Jocelyne Sambira of Africa Renewal Online reports about the opportunity for free education through cooperation with the Burundi government and partners such as Unicef offering facilities and educational materials. They point out that whilst the rates are higher in rural areas, the drop out rate is high. In some areas the drop out rates vary by gender and wonder about economic issues that may be affecting these decisions as well as maturity.

The problems compound across the entire education system, Mr. Wedenig explains. “If you have a low intake in early childhood development for instance, it is sure that you would have lower achievements and retention in primary school. If you have high dropouts in primary, low transition to secondary and high dropouts in secondary, obviously you will have a problem in terms of the quality not only for university and tertiary education, but also for teacher colleges and for the future of teaching.”

In full

My Favorite Math Common Core Resources

Mrs Jill Thompson has curated a list of maths resources that she has researched and shares links to them

Part of my job as a facilitator is to help our teachers understand and implement the Common Core correctly.  In order to help some of our teachers, I go through websites and blogs and weed out the ‘not so good’ and give teachers a list of sites that are worth taking the time to explore deeper. Below is my collection of FREE sites and blogs that I have ‘deemed’ as worthwhile and of quality that support the standards through lessons, performance tasks, strategies and other resources.  (In no particular order)

She has also set up a wiki page where people can contribute any others that they know about

The list

 

15 Inspiring Examples of Free Online Education

This list provides links to videos, open courseware, webcasts, wikis and more from a variety of institutions

All 15

And a useful overview of the thinking behind massive open online education, see also from George Siemens on Moocs for the Win and Stephen Downes on Education as Platform and the Mooc Experience:

Sea Change in Knowledge and Education

by Leslie Poston, Magnitude Media

In this post Leslie discusses the relationships between return on investment in education, college and expected employment and highlights examples of how schools are moving beyond initial adoption of social media so that

“access to knowledge in your pocket can break the institution of “school” out of the concrete, rigid shell it lives in and turn it into organic knowledge that students yearn for”

Are we moving towards plugging into the matrix and learning like Neo?

http://magnitudemedia.net/2011/12/sea-change-in-knowledge-and-education/