Tuesday, 19 November 2013

The Role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Education



 The main purpose of the Strategy for Information and Communication Technology Implementation in Education is to provide the prospects and trends of integrating information and communication technology (ICT) into the general educational activities. The role of ICT in education is to empower the technology into present educational activities. ICT allows open source learning rather than manual source, hence encouraging students to learn new ideas. ICT also brings about active learning, collaborative, creative, integrative and evaluative aspects to the education sector. The following points implicates the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Education
  1. Enabled Personalized Learning: Learning is not a one size fits all. Technology can offer a personalized learning environment that is tailored to students’ individual differences: progression level, pace, interests, learning style, and background. Technology provides the support and challenge required to keep students engaged and motivated and empowers them to reach their potential
  2. Sound Educational Investment: ICT Increases Productivity and Promotes Conducive Teaching and Learning Environments. Given scarce budget dollars of most schools, districts, and ministries of education, ICT is one of the key investments that should be made that benefits teachers and students. 
  3. Increased Global Collaboration: ICT tools allow students to connect and communicate with classrooms all over the world, resulting in increased global awareness and a sense of cultural identity means ICT can be a way to Promote Global Citizenship.
  4. Measurable Teacher Outcomes: ICT has brought about many dramatic changes in how teachers teach and how students learn. Educators use ICT to design and assess learning activities, to communicate with students, parents, and community members, as well as to participate in professional development experiences. 
  5. Bridging the Gender Gap:  ICT can be used as a Tool to Improve the Gender Balance. ICT has minimized gender differences in academic achievement. Lower achieving boys have improved performance and higher test scores with ICT. Other studies recognize that ICT helps improve the performance and attitudes of female students in traditionally male-dominated fields. 
  6. Enriched STEM Learning : The products and services of the future will depend on engineers, scientists, and technology experts to create them. ICT assists students in collaborating with peers and experts, designing products, collecting and analyzing performance data, and, in many cases, actually helping them build products.
  7. Increased Global Competition:  Investing in technology helps schools perform better. The increasingly important role ICT plays in economic development and the rapid rate at which it changes makes it difficult for schools and countries which do not invest in technology to complete globally.
  8. Supporting Economic Development: Research suggests that implementation of ICT in the classroom, along with the transformation to learner-centered instruction, supports economic and social benefits throughout a country.
  9. Greater Community Involvement : Technology can help support parent and community member involvement in student learning by using methods such as school websites, email, blogs, text-messaging, etc. to help keep interested parties aware and engaged in their local education system.
  10. Improved Academic Reporting : Effective ICT integration provides educational institutions with a variety of tools that community members and educators can use to analyze data such as demographics, achievement, and budgets. This feedback and analysis loop helps keeps schools accountable to their community. 
  11. Fostering Workforce Development:  In both developed and developing countries, non-skilled jobs are disappearing. The rapid changes brought about by technology demand that workers learn not only how to use specific tools, but also how to implement strategies for lifelong learning in the workplace. 
  12. Enhanced Teamwork & Cooperation: ICT tools foster an anytime, anywhere environment of increased student cooperation and teamwork. Similarly, technology implementation leads to increased collaboration and teamwork among teachers who are planning ICT integration in their curriculum.
Source:  http://www.intel.ie/content/www/ie/en/education/education-ict-benefits-infographic.html

Monday, 18 November 2013

Notepad Tutorial: Introduction to Notepad

Microsoft Notepad is a text editor that comes with Windows. It doesn’t offer a lot of features other than being free with your operating system. 

Notepad Features

  • Text editor
  • Search and replace
  • Upgrade discounts or freeware
  • No limits on free or trial version
  • No subscription fee required
  • Help to write code in different languages like java, HTML etc.

Introduction

Notepad is a handy program that a user can type in text quickly and easily. It is not for publishing a book but more of a scratchpad. This is a tutorial on how to use Notepad.

What will be taught
  • Opening Notepad
  • Saving a document
  • Printing a document
  • Opening an existing document

Open Notepad

To open Notepad click on start > All Programs > accessories > notepad
To enter text, just start typing in Notepad.
If you make a mistake typing you can backspace over it.

Save

To save your work click on File > Save and if you have not saved it before a screen will appear.
For now, make sure the Encoding is set to ANSI.

Print

To print File > Print...  The three dots after the word Print means there will be another screen that pops up. This is a Windows standard.
 Select the printer you wish to print to then click the 'Print' button.

Open

To open an existing notepad document click on File > Open...
If you have not saved a document you are working on, Notepad will ask you if you want to save it or discard it. The Open window appears (note the word 'open' in the title bar) which allows you to browse to your existing document.
Note the File name has a *.txt which means when you browse for your already created document only notepad type documents (those ending with .txt) will show up in the Open window.

Format

The next options are under the Format heading.

Word Wrap

Normally selecting word wrap is the best thing. What this does is when enabled, when typing in Notepad comes to the right side of the page, the words will wrap and start on the next line without having to hit the Enter key.

Note this does not affect printing. If there is a several line paragraph in which Enter was never hit then the paragraph will take up the entire width of the printed paper's margins.

To turn word wrap ON click on Format then Word Wrap. A checkmark will appear next to Word Wrap.

To turn word wrap OFF click on Format then Word Wrap. The checkmark next to word wrap will disappear, indicating word wrap is off. 
 

Font:

 It will help you to change Font type (such as Ariel, Times New Roman) Font style (Italic , Bold, Regular) Font Size (in no.)
 
 VIEW: 
 
 Show Status Bar Check on this status bar give the cursor information in form of Coloumn No. and Row no.

Difference between Microsoft Office and Open Office

Difference between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, includes philosophical, Usability and Interface , Sharing and support differences between the two packages. The Key difference is Microsoft Office is a suite of different applications, servers and services that was developed by Microsoft Company for Windows and Mac OS X operating systems in1989. OpenOffice is open-source, free software that is available to everyone on the market for download.

Microsoft Office is a suite of different applications, servers and services that was developed by Microsoft Company for Windows and Mac OS X operating systems in1989. Microsoft Office is wholly owned by the Microsoft Corporation and is developed, tested, marketed and sold by the company. The Office system is available in different versions for different users, such as Professional, Home and Student. The MS Office software charges a price on its software on the basis of the cost incurred plus profits. 

Though initially, MS Office only comprised Word, Excel and PowerPoint, it now offers various different applications and programs such as Outlook/Entourage, Access, InfoPath, OneNote, Project, Publisher, SharePoint Workspace (formerly known as Groove), Visio, Office InterConnect and Office Picture Manager.Microsoft Word created the doc format, which is de facto format for storing document files on the computer. The new versions from Office 2007 started using a new XML-based format (docx). MS Office offers applications such as Writer, Calc, Impress, Base, Draw, and Math.

Open Office, previously named as StarOffice, was originally developed as proprietary software, similar to MS Office, by StarDivision. In 1999, StarDivision was acquired by Sun Microsystems and in 2000 Sun announced that it was making the source code of StarOffice available for free download to build an open-source development community for the software and as a free and open alternative to MS Office. It was renamed as OpenOffice.org. Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle in 2010, who continued developing the software and it is now sold under the name Apache OpenOffice.

OpenOffice is open-source, free software that is available to everyone on the market. OpenOffice offers software applications such as word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, graphics, formula editor, and database management applications. OpenOffice’s default document format is the OpenDocument Format (ODF) for files, though it also has the ability to open and read MS Office formats. OpenOffice also offers the option of saving files and documents in MS Office 2003 formats. The user interface of the Open Office is similar to that of the MS Office 2003. OpenOffice is supported on various platforms such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD, OpenVMS, OS/2 and IRIX and can also support over 120 languages. 

Here are the some Key Difference between Microsoft Office (MS Office) and Open Office (Apache Open Office)

Microsoft Office
Open Office
1. Definition Microsoft Office is a suite of different applications, servers and services such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc Open Office is a suite of open-source office productivity software suite that contains word processor, spreadsheets, presentations, etc
2. Developer Microsoft StarDivision, later acquired by Sun Microsystems which was also later acquired by Oracle
3. Costs It will cost around 1k Rs. prices may vary depending on version Is a free software
4. Update you would have to pay to update the suite Updates to open-source applications also cost nothing
5. Changes  It is a proprietary software you can not change the code and can not Publish it It is Open source software. You can improve the program or build something completely new with it and release your changes to the public
6. Operating Systems Supports Windows and Mac platforms Supports almost all platforms including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD, OpenVMS, OS/2 and IRIX
7. Interface Office versions after 2007 included a ‘ribbon’ interface The current version of Open Office uses 3's interface, is similar to the MS Office 2003
8.Interface for Application In MS office you need to open each application separately A single interface for the whole suite . OpenOffice provides an overall gateway to easily get to any of the individual components
9. File size MS Office have large file sizes OpenOffice's native format generally creates much smaller files than Microsoft Office
10. Documents Opens all Microsoft document files, such as doc, docx, xls, xlsx, ppt, pptx Supports all MS Office files
11. Support Is developed professionally and if you have a licensed program you can receive professional support Is an open software, a user can receive help from open forums online
12. Sharing MS Office has the ability to share its documents; although a person who has Office 2003 may need to convert documents from 2007 and 2010 to 2003 format in order to read it Open Office also allows users to share documents. However, a document created in Open Office will only be supported by MS Office 2003 versions
13.Email Integration one of the big advantages of Microsoft Office is its integration with Microsoft Outlook, it allow to preview Microsoft Office documents directly in Outlook OpenOffice supports emailing documents but not previewing
14. Components Word, Excel, Outlook/Entourage, PowerPoint, Access, InfoPath, OneNote, Project, Publisher, SharePoint Workspace (formerly known as Groove), Visio, Office InterConnect, Office Picture Manager penOffice offers software applications such as word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, graphics, formula editor, and database management applications.
15 Specific Features MS office offers some Specific Features like Grammar checking, Conditional formatting, Document-viewing options
"Smart Art" diagrams which
offers a lot more flexibility and control
Open office offers only some of these features with less
flexibility and control

Tags: Difference between Microsoft Office and Open Office, Difference between MS Office and Open Office, Introduction to Microsoft Offic, Introduction to Open Office, Introduction to MS Offic,  Introduction to Apache Open Office