Animated cartoons for early childhood science education

Animated cartoons for early childhood science education Teachers teaching methods change because of the new generation of children. For this reason, teachers should use contemporary teaching methods for improving the quality of learning. In this framework teaching innovations which can meet such expectations are needed. This paper is a report of work describing curriculum which involves cartoons as a basis for teaching science. Here we can picture young pupils gaining knowledge through texts, teacher lectures and cartoons. It is important to realize that one of the reasons why science is thought to be difficult by many students in elementary education is that it is viewed as dealing with concepts which are often difficult to be explained and understood. Some students feel that they have to learn a lot of theory without considering how this theory might apply to the real world they are living in. This study represents findings on the use of animated cartoons and how they are able to evaluate the effectiveness in supporting teaching and le arning in science. The research results provide evidence that the use of animated cartoons significantly increases the young students` knowledge and understanding of specific science concepts. The importance of cartoons in science education has been recognized in recent years as they received an increasing amount of research attention. The presentation of ideas in visual form has been proven to be particularly important as it helps the educational process in a very up-to-date way. Why are cartoons so popular among young children and how can they be used for the purposes of teaching as well as learning? Research evidence indicates that cartoons are widely used as innovative and supporting tools in science teaching. Actually, they represent a form of art that has been promoted into an important visual language, which influences the human feelings and transmit messages using symbols and pictures. They are a combination of humour , exaggeration and symbols but in a very simple way. Euli e/1969/ pointed out very successfully that cartons, contain messages and when they are selected carefully, they can easily provide information via the symbols and the exaggeration. Most important is that they use familiar pictures and objects from daily life. In addition, cartoons can be used effectively in the teaching process when they provide information with regard to concrete objects. They were used by many researches in the classroom in order to promote learning, esp. in teaching children./Madden,Chung$Dawson,2008;Peacock,1995;Tsou,Wang&Tzeng,2006/. More over, the most innovative use in the instructive practice is that they easily capture students’ attention and then they allow them to’ travel with their mind ‘in the world of imagination and amusement while they are learning. Not surprisingly, cartoons have rapidly become a popular teaching and learning approach. Keogh and Naylor /1999/ ,he creators of the ‘concept cartoon strategy, have used it incre asingly in both primary and secondary education. . Concept cartoons offer an innovative approach to gaining access to children’s ideas in science. They have been used in different ways and in different situations to teach science, to assess pupils’ levels of understanding of science matters and to involve them in scientific discussion as well as to promote children’ s argumentation in primary science /Naylor,Keogh and Downing,2007/.

Obama presidency and the media Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Obama presidency and the media - Essay Example In this respect, managing the president’s message is of paramount importance to the White House’s communications operations because it inevitably determines how the message is perceived both internally and externally, how it is interpreted, thereby influencing its outcomes respectively. This paper is an update chapter to Martha Joynt Kumar’s â€Å"Managing the president's message†, examining how the Obama administration has coped with new media and traditional media, and the effectiveness of the administration in conveying its message. Additionally, the paper comments on how the old and new media have covered the Obama presidency from the perspective of a news consumer on the premises of whether or not one can make judgment or take action based upon the information received by the news media. Out of seven US presidents in the period following World War II including Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and George W Bush developed effective communications ope rations because both the presidents and their staff understood the significance of explaining to the public the administration’s priorities and strategies that promoted their achievement (Kumar 1). Unlike these five heads of state, Republican George H W Bush and Democrat Jimmy Carter, the two chief executives who had minimal interest in presidential communications since they did not consider them as fundamental aspects of their presidency, had a lot of difficulty winning support of legislators and the public on many issues. The four basic functions of the presidential communications operations include advocating, explaining, defending, and coordinating on behalf of the chief of state; how effectively the communications operations carry out these functions depends on various factors. These include the nature of what the administration is trying to sell, the chief executive’s communication competence, organizational components of the communications operation; most import antly, the organization of the communications operations needs central control, an infrastructure that satisfies the ever-large news reporters need for news, and a team of communications staff that has vast knowledge of reporters’ routines. The single most important benchmark for effective communications operations is the nature of policies and effective performances of the administration that is trying to sell them since even if the communications operations is so good at what it does, it cannot function on a backdrop of weak policy or weak implementers. Like his predecessors, the US president Barrack Obama also regularly communicates with his fellow citizens to inform them of his administration’s plans, decisions, as well as stand points on both global and domestic policy issues as need may dictate, but through new media. Coping with new and traditional media The Obama presidency values the significance of an effective communications operations mechanism for the effe ctive delivery of his messages and, unlike all other presidents who have also longed to reach the people directly, bypassing the big national news agencies, the Obama presidency has taken this quest to extreme heights altogether with his thorough disdain of the media (Rubin). The Obama presidency has shunned mainstream media, and while he engages with both print and broadcast media every day, the chief of state together with his staff

How do the views of 'constructivist' theorists about international Essay

How do the views of 'constructivist' theorists about international security differ from those of 'neo-realists'' - Essay Example Much of this analysis will draw from the work of British historian Eric Hobsbawm, arguably one of the most prominent scholars of the history of globalization. We then conclude with an overview of the issues explored and argue that neoliberalism and globalization are intrinsically intertwined. Neoliberalism has been the driving force of the global economic order since the latter half of the twentieth century. The current state of world affairs has its precursors in the social revolution of the 1960s, economic crises in the 1970s culminating the collapse of the New Deal and the OPEC oil crisis, as well as the emergence of neo-liberalism as a driving political and economic force in the 1980s. Events from the late 1960s reverberated in the Communist world and finally came to a head in the 1980s with total economic and political collapse. The Soviet sphere, coupled with the former Yugoslavia, provide the best examples of this phenomenon. Additionally, the end of the Cold War has had important implications for the already precarious states of Africa and has coincided with the emergence of Asian economic â€Å"Tigers†: a global economic shift towards emerging East Asian powerhouses. Our current wave of globalization will be traced back to the late 1960s, beginning with t he â€Å"social revolution† of that decade, and will end with today’s international state of affairs. The social revolution of the 1960s was also a cultural revolution. In fact, the â€Å"rise of a specific, and extraordinarily powerful youth culture indicated a profound change in the relation between generations† (Hobsbawm 1994, p. 324). Leading this cultural revolution were the young: teenagers started wearing jeans – prior to that only farmers wore them – and rock music became the voice of a generation (Hobsbawm 1994, p. 324). In fact, industries saw the potential