Meeting the Standards in Primary ICT

This practical guide to using ICT in the primary classroom addresses all the concerns of student teachers and provides plenty of ideas and advice on how to incorporate ICT into classroom practice on a daily basis. The authors bring together theory and practice to help prospective and new teachers acquire and develop the skills required for using ICT effectively. Meeting the Standards in Primary ICT is split into three sections which will: help assess the readers' ICT skills, knowledge and understanding discuss ways of incorporating ICT for teaching across the primary curriculum help the reader to think about ICT and their own professional learning and development. This book will be an invaluable resource for all student teachers on primary training courses, lecturers and mentors supporting trainees on these courses and newly qualified teachers (NQTs)

Structure out of sound

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1993.Vita.Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-170).Michael Jerome Hawley.Ph.D

Managing bipolar moods without medication:a qualitative investigation

This thesis begins with a literature review examining whether family interventions for people diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder (BD) lead to better outcomes for their relatives, who often exhibit greater service utilisation and greater distress than the general population. Following a systematic search of the quantitative literature, ten papers were identified, analysed for relevant data, and assessed for their methodological rigour. Results indicated that family interventions may improve relatives’ feelings of carer burden and psychological distress, but that these conclusions must be treated with caution given methodological issues in the evidence base. Suggestions are made as to which type of family intervention clinicians should consider offering, and which priorities future researchers in this area may wish to address. Decisions not to use medication among people diagnosed with BD are often viewed as indicative of a ‘lack of insight’ into the nature of bipolar moods and medication. However, research has not examined the individual’s experiences once they decide to manage bipolar moods without medication. The empirical paper presented here seeks to elucidate the processes by which people manage bipolar moods without medication by using grounded theory methods. Ten participants were interviewed and a model developed from their data. This model suggests participants engaged in a complex decision-making process as to how to manage their moods, frequently with reference to beliefs they held about themselves and their mood, suggesting that the ‘lack of insight’ model may be inadequate for understanding the processes involved in managing bipolar moods without medication. On the basis of the model developed from the data, suggestions are made regarding clinical interventions and future research. There then follows a critical appraisal of the work conducted in the empirical paper, focussing on challenges in the area of recruitment, in the hope that reflections provided will aid future researchers in this area

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGINEERING STUDENTS' CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING OF MATHEMATICS

Following widespread concern over an apparent decline in the mathematical skills of engineering students, this study employed survey and observation methods to investigate the ways in which engineering students understand mathematical concepts, and to compare these with the concepts held-by students of mathematics. It was found that the engineering students employ a different vocabulary from mathematics students in discussing mathematics, and that their understanding of mathematical concepts develops differently from mathematics students both in response to teaching (which appears to be a transitory effect) and as their experience gives meaning to the ideas in life outside study. These findings are important in two ways. We need to make the mathematics teachers of engineering students aware of the language and concepts of their students so that the possibility of mutual misunderstanding is reduced, and we as educators need to help engineering students to make these connections in order to ground their mathematics in reality and to use mathematics an Instrument for understanding the world. Compared with the classical mathematical modelling paradigm and the classical empirical modelling paradigm, the method used by engineering students was found to be a hybrid based on the Identification of the type of problem and the application of a "preexisting law. Some misconceptions concerning the behaviour of beams In bending were found to be widely held, by respondents with a range of levels of experience. Whereas the particular misconceptions are not Important in themselves. It Is salutary to realise that expertise in one area of study does not necessarily Inoculate one against misconceptions In a closely related area. A software package was written using the context of mathematical modelling to help students relate concepts In calculus to physical situations. This package was found not to engage the students sufficiently to provoke cognitive change, and suggests that a higher degree of Interactivity Is needed

Word Spotting in Bitmapped Fax Documents

Images and signals may be represented by forms invariant to time shifts, spatial shifts, frequency shifts, and scale changes. Advances in time-frequency analysis and scale transform techniques have made this possible. However, factors such as noise contamination and “style” differences complicate this. An example is found in text, where letters and words may vary in size and position. Examples of complicating variations include the font used, corruption during facsimile (fax) transmission, and printer characteristics. The solution advanced in this paper is to cast the desired invariants into separate subspaces for each extraneous factor or group of factors. The first goal is to have minimal overlap between these subspaces and the second goal is to be able to identify each subspace accurately. Concepts borrowed from high-resolution spectral analysis, but adapted uniquely to this problem have been found to be useful in this context. Once the pertinent subspace is identified, the recognition of a particular invariant form within this subspace is relatively simple using well-known singular value decomposition (SVD) techniques. The basic elements of the approach can be applied to a variety of pattern recognition problems. The specific application covered in this paper is word spotting in bitmapped fax documents.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45988/1/10791_2004_Article_260693.pd