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Mozaik Education would like to do our part to raise awareness of the global blood shortages and the urgent need to donate blood worldwide. Please donate today! #MissingType
Many people are well intentioned and want to donate blood, but often say they “don’t have enough time.” Others may be uninformed in regards to the safety of the process. However, what is more important is to consider how precious time is for those awaiting a critical transfusion when their very safety is at stake. Blood is short… time is short… please search “give blood” in your web browser to find the nearest opportunity to donate today!
There is a lot of good and relevant information for students contained in this video, including the requirements to donate, process, safety precautions and much more. Watch our friend Milan give blood like a champ! He doesn’t even flinch! And neither should you at the opportunity to save a life.
Mozaik believes that education is the key to overcoming ignorance and misunderstanding. Just 5 minutes could change your student’s perspective on the safety of the process, inform them of the importance of this lifesaving human service, and alleviate any fears they might have along the way. Information is power and 5 minutes is all it takes to plant the seed for informed, future blood donors.
Or better yet, turn it into an entire lesson with our human blood 3D!
If you happen to follow our Facebook page, you may have noticed that our team has been on the move recently! Here's a little bit about the shows we've attended and what our International Business Development team has been up to.
It all started out at the very beginning of the year. In January we attended the BETT Show in London and met a lot of teachers and business owners from around the world. BETT is the largest show we attend annually, and visitors come from every continent to visit the show. Well, except maybe Antarctica! 
We also attended the Didacta Education fair in Cologne, Germany this February. The five-day exhibition was followed by the GESS Education show (Gulf Educational Supplies and Solutions) in Dubai in March. Besides attending the exhibitons we always do, we are visiting new ones as well. This year we added ISE Amsterdam to our list which is one of the world's largest AV equipment exhibition, and for the first time we exhibited at the Children's Book Fair in Bologna.
In the future we are planning to stay as busy as always! You can definitely meet us at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2016 and at the BETT Show in London in January 2017. We will surely have our own stand at the Didacta Show in Stuttgart, Germany in February 2017 but if the Middle East is closer to you see us at GESS Dubai in March next year.
To schedule a meeting and speak with our team about publishing and edtech solutions, email us at office@mozaweb.com or just pass by our stand and see our latest development in interactive education.
See you around (the world)!
Last week two of our partners met up in Nigeria!
Gimpex Learning Technologies has made an appearance in our blog before, so you may already know that our trusted partners in Egypt are experts at holding trainings and making presentations in English, German and Arabic to teachers and customers. But it might surprise you to learn that they’re world travelers, too...
Recently they attended the GESS show with us in Dubai, in order to make presentations to local businesspeople and educators in Arabic, and now they’ve just returned from a trip to Lagos to meet our partner in Nigeria, Crystal Learning. Gimpex held a training session for several Crystal Learning employees, as well as many teachers from Straitgate School who are preparing to use mozaBook for their classes for the rest of this year and next. Take a look at this table of teachers... looks like a productive session!
The training covered mozaBook, mozaWeb, and the tools, games and content accessible from both platforms, including an introduction of the mozaBook application for portable Android devices. The teachers are already using the program in preparations for their classes and today we received word that the students are really excited about the upcoming interactive lessons!
Visit the Mozaik Education LinkedIn page to hear about our upcoming B2B partner training sessions in Hungary. Contact us if you’re interested in scheduling a teacher training event for mozaBook near you.
The ability to create a concise, well designed, and persuasive presentation is a skill that is hard to overestimate in the modern world. In fact, success in some business roles is almost entirely up to one’s presentation skills. I personally spend a fair amount of time here at Mozaik making presentations for our Business partners from all over the world, and know very well that a good presentation can take you a long way.
By now I feel that I can comfortably create and perform a good presentation, but achieving this state took me quite a while. I very well remember my numerous fiascos as a presenter, which I should be honest had as much to do with lack of preparation as with lack of experience. I naturally improved over time, but I still feel that if I had taken a formal presentation skills course at school it would save me quite a bit of trouble and anxiety.
Don’t take me wrong, I am not saying that schools are totally failing at teaching students how to make presentations. I have gone through various education systems in different countries and should say that many of my teachers dedicated quite a lot of hours to listen to oral reports by students. What I was not taught, however, was how to create a good presentation using modern technology, and how to deliver my message in a convincing way. Nor was I ever really given feedback on the way I delivered the message. Instead the focus was only on the quality of research I performed to get the information that was required to create the presentation. I was doing a lot of presenting during my school years, but it never seriously crossed my mind that presentation skills is something I should give a lot of my attention to. Thus my argument is not that more school hours should be dedicated to teaching presentation skills, but rather that the way they are taught, especially taught in high school should be revised.
It is important to teach students to create a wholesome presentation that is enjoyable to listen to and leaves the audience with the right questions and conclusions. The type of a high quality presentation everyone is so used to watching on TED Talks for inspiration. Story-telling techniques have already conquered the business world and it is about the time they are introduced into the classroom which is a perfect place for them not only to be used by teachers, but also to be taught to students.
We are big fans of presentation skills here at Mozaik Education, we even created this awesome educational presentation software called mozaBook that is designed specifically to make it easier for the teachers to make truly impressive presentations (or lessons, as we are used to calling them in the educational world) for the students. The version of mozaBook for home use, called mozaBook Personal, was created to give students an opportunity to prepare high quality presentations at home and present them to the class during the lesson or share them online.
The technology has already made it possible to transform students into presentation gurus and now it is up to the teachers to use this technology in the classroom.
Download a free trial version of mozaBook Multilang and discover the advanced presentation tools that were created specifically for educational purposes. Nowhere else will you find a presentation software that comes together with a huge package of educational 3Ds and videos at no extra cost!
Mozaik Education has always aimed to create software and content that makes current hardware in schools more beneficial for education. Consider the following situation: if teachers have interactive boards, but don’t have any education-specific tools to use on that board, that interactive board is nothing more than very expensive wall decoration which teachers use to write notes on - exactly in the same way they used their traditional whiteboard. Plus maybe they will open one or two photographs from the Internet, helping them skip some trips to the printer. There’s no mistaking that the hardware has a lot of potential, but it’s our development team’s job to think about what we can create to enable that technology to make teachers’ jobs easier, make learning more exciting for students, and actually increase the effectiveness of the digital classroom.
First there were interactive whiteboards. Many schools worldwide received funding to purchase the boards, but there was really no effect on education, in fact it was confusing for many teachers to have the hardware with no clear use or benefit. Now interactive panels are being seen more and more in schools, which is a more versatile technology. Now we are experiencing the rise of the tablet. Back in 2014, it was already reported that nearly 70% of schools in the UK had tablets for students to use, some schools even went as far as starting programs that would ensure one tablet per student. Besides tablet use in schools, one BBC article stated that 70% of students also had access to tablets at home.
As tablet use in education started increasing, we began to hear more questions about what our mozaBook software and mozaWeb platform could do for students with tablets. Our team immediately responded to this feedback by beginning to develop tablet applications for mozaBook. Tablets running the Windows operating system can actually run the fully-functional mozaBook software, in the very same way that it works on a PC. In fact, in Austria there is already a great education hardware/software package on the market called eduTab, an impressive combination the Microsoft tablet, Lemberger publications and the mozaBook platform.
Our latest release of the mozaBook application for tablets is for Android. mozaBook is already available on Google Play and this application allows students to use their teachers' presentations and digital textbooks right on their tablet, as well as run all of the interactive educational tools and game applications, interactive 3D scenes and videos within.
Along with this rise in tablet use for education comes a larger need for good classroom management functionality. mozaBook CLASSROOM includes a classroom management menu which allows teachers to start a virtual classroom. Once teachers start their classroom connection, they receive a code. The students simply open mozaBook and enter that code on their tablet to join the virtual classroom environment. Teachers can always see who is connected and who isn’t, as well as get screenshots any time, to make sure everyone is on track. Teachers can also share pages of a textbook or Exercise books (presentations) directly to students’ devices. In addition, teachers can send tools, games, tests, assignments, videos or images to students. Students can use that digital content and make basic notations.
mozaBook is a unique software that brings content together for teachers. Why is it unique, you ask? The edtech industry has created a lot of useful programs for digital classrooms over the last decade, but this has resulted in many tools made by many different developers, made for use on various platforms. This makes it rather difficult to navigate for teachers who already have very little time for lesson planning. mozaBook brings a large range of tools, games and content into one presentation software, allowing teachers to use our huge library of content, their own files, elements from the Internet and textbooks all into one program. It's a great way of tying all the elements of digital learning together.
One final note for all edtech and Android fans: several individual 3D models are available for download on the Google Play Store, so feel free to try our interactive content for free!
Multilingualism is one of the phenomena of the modern world, prompted by economic and cultural globalization. According to recent research there are more multilingual than monolingual people in the world. The situation when individuals are using one language at home, another one at work and yet another one while socialising with their friends is becoming a norm rather than an exception.
The European continent, with its fluid national borders in the past and growing economic and cultural integration in the present, is one of the places where duo and multilingual teaching systems are no longer a dream, but a reality and a strong necessity.
Many European countries have more than one official language with Serbia being an absolute leader of the continent in this respect, recognising seven official languages; Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland following closely behind. Luxembourg has a unique educational system using three languages as the main instruction languages during the span of twelve years of schooling. However, even those European countries that only recognise one official language often have minorities that are either allowed to learn exclusively in their mother tongue or in both the official language and their native language. For example, there are plenty of Hungarian schools in Romania and parents can choose whether they want their children to be schooled exclusively in Hungarian or bilingually.
Luckily enough, the modern education system gives even those children who were not exposed to a bilingual environment from the cradle an opportunity to become fluent in a foreign language. Languages are seen as one of the most important disciplines in many European schools and are taught from the first grade. Students in many countries also have an opportunity to learn a second foreign language at no additional cost.
Despite this continuous and truly impressive progress of expansion of the bilingual population in Europe, teaching languages remains a very challenging task. Although language teaching techniques have definitely advanced a lot in the last two decades, it seems that no one has yet found a golden technique that would help make every single student fluent in a foreign language. Some argue that no such technique can be developed when it comes to language learning. Instead, the main task of the teacher is to get off the beaten path and show students all the opportunities that speaking a foreign language offers.
mozaBook is a powerful educational tool whether it is used for bilingual classrooms or to support the study of a foreign language. mozaBook is translated into 20 languages and the MULTILANG mozaBook license allows for the interchangeable usage of these languages. It is possible to switch the operational language at any point while running the software. mozaBook also contains educational tools that were specifically designed to help students learn foreign languages. For example, our Word finder and Lan(g)game tools are a fun way for students to learn new words, while our Spelling tool is a bottomless resource of spelling exercises to use in class. If these are still not enough, our 3D models can run in two languages simultaneously and become the center of attention in a bilingual classroom.
If you would like to incorporate fun and interactive language tools into your language classes or at your international school, you can learn more about MULTILANG mozaBook in our webshop.