Kannan Raman is a Business Administration graduate with 10+ years of working in middle east education sector. He works with schools, technical colleges and universities to design and implement STEM Lab / MakerSpaces / Innovation Lab / Design and Technology Lab. Kannan manages www.stemclouds.com | Virtual Hands-On Learning platform designed to conduct various workshops for schools, technical colleges and universities.
A key career readiness skill is to enable students to learn by doing, encouraging them to collaborate with each other, reach outside classroom, and to create curious mind-set.
With the new UAE work permit to allow children aged 15 and above to get part-time jobs in the country, how do schools prepare their secondary students for the jobs of today and future.
At STEMClouds, we are a team of education enthusiasts who are passionate about making learning experiences fun and exciting and want to help learners transform their ideas into reality that meet the highest quality standards as it takes academic rigor, technical skills training, and work experience to ensure that they are career ready.
As UAE moving towards a knowledge-driven society, secondary education should let students develop appropriate and meaningful skills to live, think and work. To attain this aim, teachers require specific knowledge and competences about technology-mediated collaborative learning strategies while overcoming preconceptions and a general sense of inadequacy towards these learning approaches.
At STEMClouds, we focus on a learning path based on the ‘Trialogical’ Learning Approach to consider the role of technology-mediated collaborative learning in the educational development and classroom practices of trainee teachers.
We specialize in Industry 4.0 Skills Training for Autonomous Systems, Virtual Reality, 3D Printing, IoT, AI and Robotics.
The Most Important Skill in All Grades
Schools use technologies as educator tools to integrate in their classrooms to enable digital learning or use technologies as life skills development for students? Did you know that many working areas or job titles that today’s children will build a career upon in the future don’t exist or haven’t been invented yet?
At STEMClouds.com we provide skill development programs that allow students to learn and apply industry 4.0 skills in hands-on practice. We don’t advocate to get our early learners to decide now on a career in dentistry or accounting, rather about the skills that successful people have in any career — skills that should be encouraged early on.
In order to prepare students for the future career ready work model, students need to become familiar with project-based learning and study models. In other words, students have the chance to apply what they have learned on a real project, instead of writing answers on paper. With STEMClouds.com our programs are designed to allow students to work on many projects in each program where they learn, simulate and process.
We encourage students to have an interaction with each other to learn about the different skills they learnt and applied.
We encourage more independent and unsupervised discussion among students. Our trainers assign projects that get kids out of the classroom so they can talk to people who do jobs outside of their small circle of experience. Also, bring experts into the class that students can interview in a more targeted way.
The most important standard to focus on for career readiness is learning by doing. To meet this standard we designed our programs with the integration of hands-on tools to allow students to apply skills in real life environment. For Example, while we use Virtual Reality as an immersive tool, but also provide training to students on how to design their own virtual environment and apply their programming skills.
There is a lot of buzz about career readiness these days, and for secondary educators, you can’t spit without finding advice on how to make our units, STEMClouds structure, or our content more aligned with prepping students for the jobs of today and the future. So how about kindergarten kids?
STEMClouds offer STEAM Professional program for kids on Animator, Artist, Archaeologist, Detective, Geologist, Environmental Engineer, Game Designer, Chef, Interior Designer, Meteorologist, Fashion Designer, Astronomer, Stage Director, Aeronautical Engineer, Veterinarian, Musician and many more.
So given the power of this kind of reflection, we break it down into four ways to incorporate career readiness at any academic level:
1) Incorporate the world of work into the lessons. Find examples of how history relates to current professions. Find model texts that are career-related. For example, demonstrate how people can use math in everyday life with the use of drone technology.
2) Ask students about their career goals at each level. Prepare students to keep a K-12 career portfolio, something that poses questions about goals at each stage of the game development program.
3) STEMClouds encourage students to collaborate with their friends in working on projects. Networking is the number one way that people get jobs. If students don’t do this (or feel uncomfortable doing this), they will have difficulty finding out about job opportunities, interviewing for jobs, etc.
4) Teach students conversational skills. Students need to feel comfortable to be able to hold a conversation with anyone (not just their friends and peers, but also adults).
We don’t just train students on technology but life skills that helps them prepare career ready.