Exploring the use of ICT in supporting teaching and learning of reading and writing skills for children with hearing impairment in an inclusive school in Karachi, Pakistan

The purpose of this research was to explore the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in teaching and learning of reading and writing skills to/by children with hearing impairment in an inclusive school in Karachi, Pakistan. In order to achieve this purpose, the research question that guided the course of the research was, \u27what are the ways in which ICT might be used for teaching and learning of reading and writing skills to/by children with hearing impairment in an inclusive school in Karachi, Pakistan\u27. Embedded in the qualitative paradigm, action research was used to explore my research question. Action research is a flexible spiral process which allows action for change and improvement and research for understanding and knowledge to be achieved at the same time (Dick, 2002). The Kemmis, McTaggart and Retallick\u27s (2004) model of action research was implemented in the study. However, only two cycles of action research could be completed. Classroom observations, semi-structured interviews, document analysis, reflective journal, video recording of classroom teaching, field notes were used as data collection methods. Four students (two with hearing impairment and two without hearing impairment) from a private inclusive school of Karachi, Pakistan, were selected as participants on the basis of a criteria. Moreover, the class teacher and assistant teacher acted as my critical friends. It was found that in order to address the learning needs of children with Special Education Needs (SEN), the use of multiple pedagogies and methodologies were helpful in keeping all the students engaged in the learning process. The use of ICT allowed the teacher to enrich the curriculum with relevant and interesting activities downloaded from the internet. However, the teacher\u27s knowledge and skills of teaching children with hearing impairment posed several challenges. Thus, the professional development of teachers and their capabilities, in using ICT in an inclusive setting was found to be critical. It was found that children with SEN needed more input for improving their vocabulary. It was found that the overall low reading level of children with hearing impairment hinders them in participating in the reading activities and discussion processes even when multimedia were used. The written instructions, along with verbal instructions, projected through multimedia projector were found helpful to include children with hearing impairment in the classroom discourse. The features of power point presentation like hypertext, hypermedia and animations, use of digital stories and colourful pictures helped in gaining students\u27 attention for the reading and writing activities of children, particularly of those with hearing impairment. The above findings have implications as to how ICT can be used in teaching/learning of reading and writing in an inclusive setting in Pakistan. Further exploration of this innovation in education in special schools has been recommended. Lastly, it is recommended that the study could be replicated in a special school for children with hearing impairment in order to gain in depth information about the use of ICT in developing reading and writing skills of children with hearing impairment, An exploratory study could be conducted to see how children with hearing impairment communicate in schools and home, without using any standardised sign language

AIoT-Based Smart Bin for Real-Time Monitoring and Management of Solid Waste

In the current time, the immense growth in population creates unhygienic environment for the citizen of a society with respect to waste generation. This rapid generation of waste leads to various infectious diseases in the environment. As followed by the traditional municipal system, in our surroundings, we can see over flooding of solid waste in the garbage bins. Solid waste management is a pivotal aspect in traditional systems and it is becoming dangerous in most populated areas. Arduous labor works and costs are required to manage and monitor garbage bins in real time. To maintain the cleanliness of a city and for real-time monitoring of trash bins, a smart bin mechanism (SBM) for smart cities is proposed in this paper, which is based on Artificial Intelligent of Things (AIoT). The SBM works on the 3R concept, that is, Reduce, Recycle, and Reuse. The SBM has the access to get real-time information about each bin and avoid overloading of these bins. The proposed framework reduces the labor cost and saves time and energy of the system. It also reduces the rate of disease infections by keeping the cities clean. Fuzzy logic is used for decision-making in selecting appropriate locations in the cities to install trash bins. The framework is implemented in the multiagent modeling environment, that is, NetLogo

LightTrust: Lightweight Trust Management for Edge Devices in Industrial Internet of Things

The phenomenal increase in the usage of Internet promotes the quality of trust in the scope of Internet of Things (IoT). Trust is beneficial in the provision of an effective, reliable, scalable, and trustworthy environment to users of the IoT network, where they can share their private information with each other on a secure communication platform. For successful communications among the Internet users, trust is an important factor to provide them with private infrastructures and secure environments, where exchanging data among devices becomes more easy and trustworthy. Therefore, trust management is a backbone for the successful and secure transmission of data among various nodes in a large-scale IoT network. To overcome the security issues, latency, and risk of malicious activities, a lightweight approach is proposed for those nodes in industrial IoT that cannot maintain security. LightTrust utilizes a centralized trust agent to generate and manage trust certificates that allow nodes to communicate for a specific time without performing trust computations. Trust agents also maintain a trust database to store the current trust degree for the aggregation/propagation purposes. Trust between two nodes is developed by direct observations in terms of compatibility, cooperativeness, and delivery ratio, whereas recommendations are used to develop trust in the context of indirect observations, i.e., experience or previous knowledge. The comparative simulations of the proposed and existing approaches are also performed whereby the results illustrate that the proposed approach efficiently maintains resilience and robust environments