Mapping Our Neighbourhood - Activity for students

Mapping Our Neighbourhood - Activity for students 

1- Land marks

2- Cardinal Directions 

Class Observation - General Feedback

Last one month, I have been observing different teachers class.

How do they teach?

What are the activities they are giving?

How is their class management ?

After going through few class observation , I just noted the following things.

I would like to extend to you the best regards and the best wishes and guidance.

One common thing is very clear that our teachers need to concentrate in activity oriented classes. Rest of the “positive and need works” feedback is given below.

POSITIVE POINTS :

Duties of Subject Coordinators in a institution.

Role and Responsibilities of Subject Coordinators in Academic Institutions

Subject coordinators play a crucial role in the academic development and smooth functioning of every educational institution. Their position typically comes under the leadership of the Head of the Department (HOD), and they act as a bridge between the HOD and subject teachers. Effective coordination ensures consistency in teaching quality, proper documentation, and continuous academic improvement.

This post outlines the key duties and responsibilities of subject coordinators.

1. Understand Your Duties and Responsibilities

The first and most important step for any subject coordinator is to clearly understand their role. Coordinators should carefully review the official job description provided by the institution. This helps in ensuring accountability, clarity, and alignment with institutional expectations.

Knowing your responsibilities allows you to work confidently and support both teachers and the department effectively.

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2. Maintain a Proper Subject File

Every subject coordinator must maintain a well-organized subject file. This file serves as an important record and reference for academic monitoring and reporting.

The subject file should include:

• All worksheets

• Question papers

• List of subject teachers

• Teachers’ performance records, including:

  • Lesson plan submission status

  • Notebook checking status

Maintaining this file helps in tracking academic progress and ensures transparency.

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3. Monitor Lesson Plan Submission

Lesson plans are essential for structured teaching. Coordinators must:

• Monitor lesson plan submissions from all subject teachers

• Maintain records showing whether plans are submitted or pending, along with dates

• Review the lesson plans and ensure quality and alignment

• Re-share the finalized lesson plan file with the HOD

This process ensures that teaching is well-planned and consistent across sections.

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4. Notes Finalization and Coordination

Subject coordinators play an important role in ensuring uniformity in student notes.

Their responsibilities include:

• Checking notes initially for accuracy and quality

• Coordinating with teachers to ensure consistency across sections

• Finalizing the notes

• Uploading the finalized notes to the school portal

This ensures that all students receive standardized and high-quality learning material.

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5. Worksheet Finalization and Distribution

Worksheets are important tools for practice and assessment. Coordinators should:

• Assign worksheet preparation duties to teachers

• Review and correct worksheets before finalization

• Forward corrected worksheets to the HOD for approval

• Collect printed copies from the HOD (if printed centrally)

• Distribute worksheets to all subject teachers

This ensures quality control and proper implementation.

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6. Monitor Notebook Correction

Notebook checking is essential for monitoring student learning and teacher effectiveness. Coordinators must:

• Randomly check student notebooks in their section

• Provide sample notebooks (for example, 25 notebooks) when requested by the HOD

• Maintain notebook checking records in the subject file

This helps maintain academic standards and accountability.

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7. Plan and Support Academic and Department Activities

Subject coordinators are expected to actively contribute to academic enrichment and department development.

Key responsibilities include:

• Planning subject enrichment activities

• Maintaining records of all activities conducted

• Taking initiative in department development activities

• Supporting innovative teaching and learning practices

This contributes to overall academic excellence and institutional growth.

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Conclusion

Subject coordinators play a vital leadership role within the academic structure of an institution. Their responsibilities go beyond administrative tasks—they ensure quality teaching, proper documentation, and academic consistency.

By maintaining proper records, supporting teachers, monitoring academic processes, and initiating enrichment activities, subject coordinators significantly contribute to the institution’s academic success.

A proactive and organized coordinator strengthens both the department and the overall learning experience of students.

Qudwa Conference - 2017

Qudwa International Teachers Conference experience. 

Tips to complete notes during school hours

I have been noticed that some teachers are not getting sufficient time to provide class notes during our regular periods.

For time being I would like to suggest you to apply some strategies to complete notes.

It may help you to complete our tasks timely., some suggestions are following.

If you have any other plan , let me know too.

# Use Zero period ( 7.30am to 7.50am )

Subject teachers have to send the notes to concern class teachers.

Suggest them to display this notes through projector

Students can copy notes during this time.

Concerned department teachers have to make sure that whether our students write or not

#Use substitution periods effectively.

Subject teachers have to send the notes to concern supervisor.

Suggest supervisor , forward notes to the teachers who go to substitution classes.

Students can copy notes during this time.

Concerned department teachers have to make sure whether our students

How was your vacation ?

After the summer vacation, I told to my pupil to share their vacation experiences. This vacation was not much happy for us. One of our beloved student named Ritivik passed away during this vacation. Today the grade 9 boy Muhammadi from Afganistan shared another shocking news. His cousin was killed by some strangers the outskirts of Kabul in Afganistan. Personally this vacation was not happy to me too. But when we hear the shocking news from my students , how can we think about our personal problems. Is it a problem? Meanwhile few students had visited different countries along with their families. I told them to prepare a write-up. I also offered 10 dojo points. Today few of them has sent their vacation experiences through mail. Marzook , a student from grade 10-P has prepare a blog.

Let us see their creative works.

Teachers comments

Teachers comments are very important in teaching learning activities.

 Students consider it very serious . Instead of writing simple like good, outstanding, Very good or any emoticons we can write some meaningful comments in their note books as well as report cards..

Here we share some comments which we collected from here.

They are given below.

Questioning in Class Room - Why and How ?

Why do we ask questions in the class room ?

• To test the previous knowledge of students
• Enable them to the recall something
• Enable them to think about something
• Mentally alert
• Stimulate curiosity
• To link new knowledge with old.
• To revise the lesson
• To diagnose the weak points of students
• To ensure participation

 Characteristics of questions

• It Should be simple
• Should not be ambiguous , lengthy and vague.
• Should be relevant to the topic.
• Echo questions should be avoided. ( Eg: Budha born in Lumbini. Where he was born ?
• Adequate time should be allowed to answer.
• Should be asked in a pleasing manner
• Should not leave students in dark.
• Should be suited to the ability of the children
• Try to avoid asking more than one questions
• Questions should be evenly distributed no child should be neglected
• To create interest you can create “Rapid fire round”.

Teacher class observation

Photo Curtsey : www.listenandlearn.org

Class observations of teaching can be extremely effective in helping to enhance teaching performance. It offers the opportunity for faculty to improve and correct themselves.
The observation’s purpose will be to provide feedback on teaching practices and to suggest ways to improve those practices, if appropriate. Any information gathered through the classroom observation process is confidential and will not be used for any purpose other than enhancement of teaching: all information stays between the observer and the teacher being observed.

So we need to ask some questions ourselves.

They are following.

• Why we are observing ?
• Are you ready for observing ?
• Why we need ?

Meeting Discussions - 15-5-17

• Congratulate Election Winners
• Messages to parents
• Message - Subject Enrichment Activities
• Intimate parents about various programmes . Eg- Career guidance 

1. Leave Application to Supervisor - Principal 
2. Maintaining of records
3. Activity Record
4. Teacher feedback file

More Content - Issues

• Prepare summary and sort it out
• Careful to add questions on the basis of this area

Need to work

• Activity Plan
• Micro Teaching
• Class Observation
• Prepare schedule for observation - Share - Supervisors too
• Feedback
• Separate books for Scores
• Worksheet Record

Departmental Meeting

Agendas
PPT

Teaching Websites

This will update soon days 

DM-14-5-17

Agenda:

1.Review of the past month, Class leader Election, Students Council Election etc..

2. UAE SST – Text books- Syllabus

3. DDP (Department Development plan)

Important days, Observations, Activites, Activity plan, Exhibitions etc

4. Portion covered – Status – Action plan
4. Chapter wise Worksheets & LMS ( Three types (high,middle and lower achiever) Display in projector.
5. Notebook correction ( Grade 10, 11 Upload ) - General Remarks

6. Group Discussion by teachers - Section wise

7. ICT - Tips

Social Study Dpt meeting - Ideas

Need to plan for following things

UAE SST- 2 Terms – Syllabus

Syllabus bifurcation – Meet with level of students – content reduce

LMS – Notes Giving – Upload notes in drive – 10 & 11

Make sure that the child is referring.

Department Development Plan

General ?

Teachers details ? Time Table

Syllabus bifurcation

Chapters – Activities

Assessment ( Evaluation plan )

Resource and Development - Seminar

I told to my students to present this chapter as a seminar and divided the topic for four houses. Students groups. All are presented very well. Especially the student named Amith Raishankar, Marzooq , Dipesh, Kevin, Steve and Deric prepared very will. in grade 10 N Muhammed Sahil, Muaz prepared prezi ppt. It was awesome work. Karthik also presented very well. He is a hard worker. In this post I just share a ppt which I prepared two years ago when i was in Springs. But i have added few things in this file and we express courtesy to slideshare community members.

Link

New PPT 

School Election 2017-18

As part of School Election, we have done many actiivities in this year. They will be expalined in coming days. Today I just share what are the messages sent to my colleagues.

Dear sir,

I am writing this email to express my sincere thanks and gratitude to you. On behalf of the Students Council Election Committee I sincerely appreciate you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to make our interview a success.

Wikipeida In Class Room

I’m really a fan of using Wikipedia in the classroom. Wikipedia brings the outside world into my classroom. With Wikipedia, there seems to be no limit to learning. I usually use Wikipedia as part of my class, especially on special topics .

I have to thank Malayalam Wikipedia Community, where many teachers and IT experts are available to connect and share many informative things. I started by connecting them in the year of 2009 onwards. After sending a doubt regarding IT they helped me a lot.This is a really interesting .

Now I think to hold a connection by inviting speaker to my classroom from different parts of the world. By using skype or any other software. 

UAE SST - Documents

UAE sst scribes.

Founding fathers 

Leadership

Training help us to develop ourselves. Even if we know many things , the same things inform by someone to do influence us. So each training programme help us for career development.Effective teacher training helps prepare new teachers for these challenges. And it provides an Understanding of the Benchmarks for Achievement Today we had an excellent leaders training Programme at Habitat School Ajman. Mr. Adil, Mr. Wasim Yousuf , Mr. Aravind and Mr. Haris led different presentation.

Session – 1

Where were we ?

Points noted during various presentation

If you are a leader, the true measure of your success is not getting people to work. It's not getting people to work hard. It is getting people to work hard together. That takes commitment." John C. Maxwell

Session – 2

Best practices in writing business email

Session – 3

Leadership

Mr. Waseem read the story of Mullah Nasruddin.

(I wrote two lined and collected by searching it. It given below.)

The Way

One sunny spring afternoon Nasrudin was sitting peacefully by the imposing North gate of Samarkand watching the colourful string of caravans following each other and followed in turn by the curious glances of the populace.

ClassDojo scheduled messages are coming this Thursday!

Hi educators,

We’ve all had that late night “Oops, forgot to send that message to parents!” 😱

Well, no more losing sleep. You can now relax little more because schedule messages on ClassDojo!

Set it to send in the morning and relax like Mojo 😉

How might teachers use scheduled messages?

• Looking ahead at upcoming events? Set a scheduled message to remind parents of that assembly, field trip, etc.!
• Need donations for a future date, but low on storage? Set a scheduled message asking for supplies closer to the date.
• Have a case of teacher brain waking you up in the middle of the night with a message you need to send? Schedule a message to be sent out first thing in the morning!
• Need to remind parents of a due date for a project? Set a couple scheduled message reminders to help keep them on track!

My Wikipedia Life

Tell us about your involvement in your home wiki or the broader Wikimedia movement. What have you built or contributed to in order to improve your wiki or community? Have you led or organized any of these activities?

I first edited the Malayalam Wikipedia in 2010, where I have now made over 2000 edits. I have made many different types of edits over the years, including article writing, copy editing, translation, , and administrative activities (since 2015). Most recently, I have been working language translation.

Staff picnic

April – 2

Staff picnic . to umm al quwain 

Location Map :

It was a nice experience for our team.

Amazing atmosphere .. and lovely beach loan combination .

Classic Story - The Story of Lion and Rat

One day a lion was sleeping in his den. A mouse was also playing nearby.

Little mouse began running up and down upon him; this soon wakened the

lion. Angry at the little mouse, the lion caught the mouse and said..

You little mouse. How dare you wake me? I will kill you. The mouse was frightened and played to the Lion..

An Email to Classdojo Team

It will be great pleasure if we make some customization in class dojo app with following requirements.

India , the second largest populous country in the world having thousands of school. We have our own national level and state level curriculum. And it is widespread in other countries , especially in middle east countries.

As part of the students evaluation, teachers have to keep anecdotalrecord. At presently teachers observe the children activities and record in note book or diary manually.

 I think if we use classdojo with minor changes it will be more systematic and helpful for thousands of countries in the world. They can use classdojo to enter all the anecdotes of children. Then it will be easy for evaluation as well as record keeping.

So, What are the changes are expecting?

Grow you food

We try to recreate what we missed from our God's own country. From the greenery we moved to desert .

The students and teachers of our School sweat it out to make the school an abode of agriculture where the arid Arabian land was “transformed” into a green pasture for all kinds of vegetables and herbs.

Today we had harvesting day of tomatoes and various vegetables.

School has increased its focus on organic farming with the appointment of the award-winning farmer from Kerala, Mini, as the school’s farming co-ordinator. Other than demarcated spaces in the open space, both a greenhouse and parts of the terrace of the school are utilised for farming.

The agricultural excitements include the teak wood that has flowered and the paddy field which is yielding paddy in the desert. Other crops on campus include tomato, papaya, okra, carrot, leafy vegetables, agathi cheera (sesbania grandiflora), lakshmi taru (Simarouba galuca), azolla, drumstick and mind leaf.

Students, after harvest, sell the crops to the interested parties and donate the money earned to different charity initiatives.

Photo Session

 Today we had photo session of all the staff. 

First row =  From left Sajir, me, Umar, Akbarali, Douglus, Arokia , Vijesh Kumar
Second row-  Sheikh Akbar, Shabeer, Sharafudhin, Ratheesh, Rafeeq and Ameer Suhail.
Back line - Praboshkumar, Sreeharim , Abdul Shafeeq, Suresh, Noufal and Mazhar

As a HOD

Today is something special in my career life. Now move to the next role as Head of the Social science department in school. Among three at last the interview board slected me to the post. Really, it will be a new experience and challenge in my career. There are 30 teachers handling social science in different classes from grade 3 to 10.

March 12. 10.30 am

Principal sir sent me an email.

“ ear Akbar,

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

This is to inform you that You are selected as the HOD(Social Science) for the academic year 2017-18.

I wish you all success and hope you will do your duties  to the best  of your abilities with utmost sincerity”.

I remember the past, my teachers and friends who all are influenced me in different ways.

Thanks to everyone your inspirational words and support.

Academic Excellence Programme

AEP is an educational programme started in the academic year 2016-17 by the Habitat School Ajman with the objective of integrated acadmeic development of grade 10 students . In the learning it mainly  aimed to enhance the academic status of grade 10 students SSLC result .

The following activities were conducted as part of this. The highlights are given below.

• The Programme period was from January 2017 to March 2017.
• We had meeting with grade 10 students' parents at School auditorium .
• Principal explained about the programme to the parents during this session.
• Calendar of "AEP" activities was prepared for each class; and ensured that each activity was carried that precisely as per the calendar.
• Backward students were given necessary training.
• It helped them very much for facing board examination.

Planning – Time table

• Categorized the students on the basis of their previous test scores.
• It named as group 1 and group 2.
• We prepared special time table for them. This was sent to parents and subject teachers in advance.
• It helped very much for planning.
• January onwards we started Block Time table.
• Two adjacent periods joined and made it one. They are called Block Time Table.
• The core subjects such as English, Mathematics, Science, Social Science were only taught during this bock periods.
• We had special classes during working days except Monday.
• It was during 2.30 to 4.15 Pm.
• In addition to block periods and stay back we had special classes during Saturdays.
• Lesson plan – Mainly activities during the special classes were mentioned and gave to students in advance.

Activities

• Two types of test papers were conducted for students
• One among was out of 25 and another was out of 50
• For 50 marks test papers , we prepared and given printed question papers.
• For each subjects, we had conducted two 50 marks test papers.
• To keep track record google sheet has shared to all teachers.
• Teachers entered the scores of each test in this sheet.
• To keep the attendance record of students another G.Sheet has shared to teachers.
• Teachers entered the attendance report during stay back classes and saturdays.
• Special remedial teaching was given to backward students, during the AEP classes.
• Special counseling classes were organised  to prepare students to face exams with self assurance
• Special career class was organised to prepare students for higher study.

Communication

• To make communication easier we made teachers mail group as well as students.
• Parents email group also prepared with the help of IT dept.
• It helped to send notification, memos to parents.
• Parents were happy with AEP programme. They felt to free contact with teachers on this .

I would like to conclude this report . And last but not least I would like to express my gratitude and thanks to Mr. Sanjeev Kumar , the principal of Habitat School Ajman, for bringing a great idea to the empowerment of students as well as he guided me to lead this team.

And also I remember the great support of our supervisors Mr Vijesh and Margeena who helped me in different ways such as timetable preparation, class coordination, maintaining discipline etc. 

Class Party

Good bye CCE, PSA, OTBA and all innovations…

And finally, CBSE bids goodbye to all innovations and experiments tried and tested during last 7 years. Now we are again in STAND AS IT IS state. Let us have an overview of these innovations and find why they failed or declared failed.
I have written an article on this . It was published in Sirajnews daily on Tuesday – February 14 – 2017. TO read this click here

New Educational Reforms - CBSE

Last day I had received an audio file through Whatsapp. A teacher from kerala expressed his opinion on changes happens in educational system. He was very much upset about new educational method and blamed its level. When I shared this file to 60 teachers to get their opinion, everyone commented the same except one teacher.
They all are not satisfied with this system. Anyhow its debate is going on.
I do not know , now CBSE also decided to re-establish many old systems in their curriculum . Currently CBSE students have two semester examinations named Summative Assessment 1 & SA2.

 It was helped them from not to study whole chapters for the final examination. But this system is going to end with this academic year. Next year onwards grade 10 board exam will include the whole syllabus.

And another important thing is that, formative assessment method also going to end with this academic year. I think, it may help the teachers .

They can save their time from many record works. Instead of formative assessment the internal assessment will include three periodic test like our old method. “Onam exam, Second term and annual”.

BACK TO TRADITIONAL SYSTEM

New marking system for 2017-18 academic session

Board exam: 80% of marks

Internal assessment: 20% marks

Board theory exam salient features (80 marks):

Entire syllabus will be included in the exam

Marks and grades will be awarded for individual subjects

9-point grading will be same as followed by Std XII board exam

Student has to secure at least 33% in each of the 5 mandatory subjects

Internal assessment salient features (20 marks):

Will be completed through three different modes

(i) Periodic written tests: 10 marks

(ii) Notebook submission: 5 marks

(iii) Subject enrichment activity: 5 marksAnd also CBSE is very cautious on students' behaviour. In order to maintain discipline among students , they have asked to concentrate attendance, sincerity, values and behaviour