World War III

World War III and the Third World War are names given to a hypothetical this worldwide large-scale military conflict subsequent to World War I and II. The term has been in use since at least as early as 1941. Some have applied it loosely to refer to limited or smaller conflicts such as the Cold war or the, while others assumed that such a conflict would surpass prior world wars both in its scope and in its destructive impact.
Due to the development and use of nuclear weapons near the end of World War II and their subsequent acquisition and deployment by many countries, the potential risk of a nuclear devastation of Earth's civilization and life is a common theme in speculations about a Third World War.
Prior to the beginning of the second world war, the first world war (1914–1918) was believed to have been "the war to end all wars," as it was popularly believed that never again could there possibly be a global conflict of such magnitude. During the interwar period, WWI was typically referred to simply as "The Great War." The outbreak of world war II in 1939 disproved the hope that mankind might have already "outgrown" the need for such widespread global wars.
With the advent of the Cold War in 1945 and with the spread of nuclear weapons technology to the Soviet union, the possibility of a third global conflict became more plausible. During the Cold War years, the possibility of a Third World War was anticipated and planned for by military and civil authorities in many countries. Scenarios ranged from conventional warfare to limited or total nuclear warfare. At the height of the Cold War, a scenario referred to as Mutually Assured Destruction ("MAD") had been calculated which determined that an all-out nuclear confrontation would most certainly destroy all or nearly all human life on the planet. The potential absolute destruction of the human race may have contributed to the ability of both American and Soviet leaders to avoid such a scenario.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_III

Refugees in Lebanon, 2019

More than 1 million Syrian refugees are registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Lebanon. The government estimates the true number of Syrians in the country to be 1.5 million.
Lebanon’s residency policy makes it difficult for Syrians to maintain legal status, heightening risks of exploitation and abuse and restricting refugees’ access to work, education, and healthcare. Seventy-four percent of Syrians in Lebanon now lack legal residency and risk detention for unlawful presence in the country. In March, Lebanon lifted some restrictions to residency for Syrian refugee children age 15-18.
In 2017, Lebanese authorities stepped up calls for refugees to return to Syria and put pressure on UNHCR to organize returns despite the ongoing conflict in Syria and well-founded fears of persecution held by many refugees.
Lebanese authorities estimated that from July to November, between 55,000 and 90,000 refugees returned to Syria under localized agreements not overseen by UNHCR. Refugees have said they are returning because of harsh policies and deteriorating conditions in Lebanon, not because they think Syria is safe. On November 3, the Minister for Refugee Affairs said that about 20 refugees, including at least 2 children, have been killed by Syrian regime forces since their return.
Municipalities in Lebanon have forcibly evicted thousands of refugees in mass expulsions without a legal basis or due process. Tens of thousands remain at risk of eviction. 
In 2018, Lebanon continued to impose entry regulations on Syrians that effectively barred many asylum seekers from entering Lebanon.
There are also approximately 174,000 Palestinian longstanding refugees living in Lebanon, where they continue to face restrictions, including on their right to work and own property. In addition, approximately 45,000 Palestinians from Syria have sought refuge in Lebanon.

Reference: https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/lebanon

Dyscalculia

Dyscalculia is a common learning issue that impacts kids’ ability to do math. It doesn’t just affect them at school, however. The challenges can also create difficulties in daily life. Dyscalculia, in broad terms, is a life-long learning disability pertaining to numbers and arithmetic skills. The media has been using words like digit dyslexia, number blindness and the obvious math dyslexia.

Symptoms of Dyscalculia:

Dyscalculia children and adults can also present with:

• difficulty counting backwards;
• difficulty remembering basic mathematical facts, even after many hours of practice and/or rote learning;
• difficulty in understanding place value and the role of zero in the Arabic/Hindu number system;
• difficulty ascertaining whether or not answers are right or nearly right;
• slow to perform calculations;
• difficulty imagining a mental number line;
• particular difficulty with subtraction, with addition often as the default operation;
• great anxiety when dealing with mathematics;
• difficulty reading;
• attention difficulties;
• problems with drawing, visualization and remembering, understanding time and direction;
• Poor coordination of movement (dyspraxia).

It’s important to note that reversing numbers is not a symptom of Dyscalculia. It is usually a normal developmental stage for children, and no cause for alarm. The same goes for remembering names – no evidence suggests that Dyscalculia is related to long-term verbal memory.

Causes of Dyscalculia:

Researchers don’t know exactly what causes dyscalculia. But they’ve identified certain factors that indicate it’s related to how the brain is structured and functions.

Here are some of the possible causes of dyscalculia:

·         Genes: Research shows that part of the difference in kids’ math scores can be explained by genes. In other words, differences in genetics may have an impact on whether a child has dyscalculia. Dyscalculia tends to run in families, which also suggests that genes play a role.

·         Brain development: Brain-imaging studies have shown some differences in brain function and structure in people with dyscalculia. The differences are in the surface area, thickness and volume of certain parts of the brain. There are also differences in the activation of areas of the brain associated with numerical and mathematical processing. These areas are linked to key learning skills, such as memory and planning.

·         Environment: Dyscalculia has been linked to fetal alcohol syndrome. Prematurity and low birth weight may also play a role in dyscalculia.

·         Brain injury: Studies show that injury to certain parts of the brain can result in what researchers call acquired dyscalculia.

Dyslexia

In 1968, the World Federation of Neurologists defined dyslexia s “ a disorder in children who, despite conventional classroom experience, fail to attain the language skills of reading, writing, and spelling commensurate with their intellectual abilities." Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty with reading, spelling, writing and sometimes speaking. The degree of suffering varies from one individual to another based on the type of teaching the person receives and on inherited differences in brain development. The brain of dyslexia has trouble recognizing or processing certain types of information. Individuals with dyslexia are unique, it is important to state that a multisensory approach can be valuable to many and especially for dyslexia individuals. In order to be able to teach students with learning difficulty, it is essential to see him or her as a whole person, with individual strengths and weakness. An understanding of the student’s specific difficulties, and how they may affect the student’s classroom performance, can enable the teacher to adopt teaching methods and strategies to help the dyslexic child to be successfully integrated into the classroom environment.

Education in Lebanon

Education in Lebanon is regulated by the ministry of education and higher education, it’s the process to build the future and it has the main tool for developing mankind. Arabic is the main language, initial foreign language, and English or French considered as a second foreign language taught from early years in school depending on the region (Most of the Christian schools use French as a second language). Education in Lebanon is divided into technical and vocational education and academic education that is divided into public and private sectors. As some of the other countries, the right to education is included also in Lebanon, freedom to education, public education is available to all and care for learners with special needs. Both public and private sectors teach the same curriculum, and there is a close cooperation between them both until reaching a partnership. According to the Lebanese banking accounts at BankMed, the total expenditure on education on the two sectors are approximately 2.42 million USD, where the private spending is more than the public one by far. Public sending depends on the external donation, and it is low when we compare the expenditure to other Arab countries like Bahrain, Egypt and Kuwait. 

Western and Eastern Philosophies

The Western philosophy of education began in ancient Greece, and it was divided into two famous philosophies which are idealism and realism. It started first by Socrates, who was an idealist, who encourage people to think and ask them a questions that lead them to think and to search for the truth under the name of the “dialectic method”. Then Plato comes, who was Socrates’s student, and wrote down both the dialectic method and the Platonic thinking in his famous book “The Republic”. He established an academy where the teaching was applied, his method was also political education and questioning that lead the people think. Idealist prefer Bloom’s hierarchy of knowledge and Maslow pyramid of human needs as an aim of education. The most important thing was to search for the truth and not the truth itself. Regarding the methods and curriculum, they used the dialectic method, intuition and revelation. After the idealism, it comes the realism the rejects the idealist notion that only ideas are real. Realists, as Aristotle, believe that also matter can be trusted, he developed the view that although ideas might be important, a proper study of matter lead to better ideas. Both idealists and realists gaining knowledge is the first thing they talked about, but the difference is how to gain it. Realists used matter to understand knowledge, to be able to control it, so they used observation and experiments in their curriculum, which is a scientific method. The teacher has a common role in both idealism and realism, which was to facilitate students and to push them toward thinking, to possess a good values and giving rewards, to ask questions and let them think not to think for them. Of course, the history of this philosophy includes many more figures other than the mentioned above; other major philosophers were Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Rene Descartes and many others.

As the Western Philosophy, there is Eastern Philosophy or Asian philosophy which includes the various philosophies that originated in East and South Asia. For example, Chinese philosophy, Japanese philosophy, Indian philosophy and Korean philosophy are more dominant in East and Vietnam. Eastern philosophy has no one goal in education, it provides information about the nature so that one could deal with them in a right way. Eastern philosophy talked about suffering in life and to accept this suffering because it is a part of our life, and it has external and internal causes. The aim from accepting this suffering helps us gain wisdom. Moreover, they talked about diminishing sense experiences, because change is important and one cannot live a good life without thoughts that brings the change. Attitude shaping is also important and the large social change often begins with individual change. All these was regarding the aims of education and its method and curriculum used.

Al-Farabi in Education

Al-Farabi was known in the west as Alpharabius (between 14 December, 950 and 12 January, 951). He was a philosopher and wrote in the fields of political philosophy, metaphysics, ethics and logic. He was also a scientist, cosmologist, mathematician and music scholar. The second teacher he was called in the Islamic traditional, following Aristotle who was the first teacher.

Aims:

Education is one of the most important social phenomena according to Al-farabi. Education is to ensures that the individual is being prepared from an early age to become beneficial member of the society. It is to achieve his level of perfection to reach his goals in life. Also, his philosophical view was to combine separate concepts and thoughts into unified world view. According to Al-farabi, the perfect human being is he who has theoretical virtue, intellectual knowledge and practical moral values. So, education is the combination of learning with practical action, and the role of the knowledge is to know how to apply it.

Methods and Curriculum:

According to Al-farabi the learning must start with the language and its structure, so the student can express himself like the people who speak that language. Next to language comes logic, which the instrument of the science and their methodology. After language and logic comes mathematics. Al-farabi describes that in the hierarchy of the theoretical sciences, arithmetic comes first. Then comes measures and after that come the other things in which numbers and measures belong that is perspectives (optics).

Role of the Teacher:

Learning are important conditions for the teacher. He has to bear a good character and seeks truth in all conditions. The teaching profession should be adopted voluntarily without any obligation; expectation may be there but only in cases of absolute necessity. The other scientific and educational requirements a teacher should meet are: mastery over his art and its rules.

Pragmatism in Education

The word Pragmatism is of Greek origin, it is the product of practical experiences of life. Pragmatism means action, from which the words practical and practice have come. It does not believe in fixed and eternal values, it is dynamic and ever-changing. Pragmatists are practical people, there is should be an experiment and its results to believe in such a truth. The emphasis of pragmatism is on action rather than on thought, thought is subordinated to action. It is made an instrument to find suitable means for action, so that’s why pragmatism is also called Instrumentalist.

Aims:

Pragmatism does not lay down any aims of education in advance. It believes that there can be no fixed aims of education. To enable the child to create values in his life is the only aim of education according to pragmatism. Also, they direct the impulses, interests, desires and abilities towards the satisfaction of the felt wants of the child in his environment. What pragmatism wants to achieve through education is the cultivation of a dynamic, adaptable mind which will be resourceful and enterprising in all situations, the mind which will have powers to create values in an unknown future.

Methods and Curriculum:

The curriculum should be framed on the basis of certain basic principles. These are utility which is the watchword of pragmatism, interest, experience and integration. The pragmatists advocate that the pupils should not be taught dead facts and theories because these may not help them to solve the problems of life. The subjects that help to solve the practical problems of life should be included in the school curriculum, particularly at the elementary stage. Purposive and socialized activities should be in the curriculum among the school subjects. The pragmatists do not allow the inclusion of cultural activities in the curriculum, because they think these activities have no practical value, but this view is somewhat narrow and biased. Pragmatic method is a Project Method which is of American origin. The most general method of a pragmatist teacher, according to Ross, is to put the child into situations with which he wants him to grapple and providing him, at the same time, with the means of dealing with them successfully.

Role of the Teacher:

According to Pragmatism a teacher is useful, a teacher is the guide and the advisor, a teacher is the helper and the prompter. His importance lies in the fact that he has to suggest suitable problems only to his students and to motivate them in such a way that they can solve the problems with tact, intelligence and cooperation. He is not required to provide raw information to the students from the textbooks.

Cyber Security

This webinar is talking about cyber security, its concerns, strategies and solutions for schools. There are five reasons why cyber security is important for schools which are: Liability, Legal requirements,  professional reputation, teaching and learning and student digital records.
Districts and technology leaders may be held liable for network security incidents, these districts may be used by families whose data was compromised by a security breach. There may be legal requirements for how data is secured, at the federal level, regulators require responsible security leaving the data holder to determine what that requires, depending on security and best practices. When the data are compromised, the reputation of both the district and the technology leader are damaged; network breaches often become the subject of media focus and creating a much bigger public relations disaster. Regarding teaching and learning, teachers who are prepared to use technology in the classroom need to take the time to find and fall back on non-digital resources. The risk is not only hackers, but also students themselves.
There are 5 solutions to be in secure: phishing, distributed denial pf service, data breach, ransomware and internet of things.

EDUC560

This course helps the teachers to have a good knowledge and a good experience in Technology, it teaches us about blogging that everyone can access and see your posts and can comment on it. Moreover, this course teaches how to attend an online sessions, like webinar, and taking notes to post it on the blog. Another thing is how to make a posters and info graphs about a certain topics. Also, it teaches us how to prepare a lesson for the students and present it in front of them using Activinspire.
We can also make an online sessions as a makeup session, and we can make a timed quiz (online also).
The only one thing that is bad in this course is poor connection.