DOHA: Qatar Foundation International (QFI) has unveiled new features on Al Masdar, a crowdsourcing online educational resources platform for Arabic teachers.
Francesca Carpenter, QFI’s Education Technology Officer, will present updates during an Arabic Resource Swap Shop hosted by QFI at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Convention — the largest annual foreign language conference in the country.
The shop on Arabic curricula and resources will provide educators with an opportunity to share activities, lesson plans, educational games and strategies and enable them to upload their resources on Al Masdar.
Master Arabic teachers will demonstrate how to implement some of their most useful resources and materials in the classroom.
Participants will also receive copies of QFI’s Madar Al Huruf curriculum, which introduces students to the Arabic alphabet and teaches them how to write in Arabic script.
QFI brings together 49 teachers from the US through its Dora Johnson Travel Awards and Teacher Fellowship grants.
It will host a Teacher Fellow workshop as part of its commitment to professional development in the field of K-12 Arabic education and sponsor a meeting of the ACTFL Arabic Standards Task Force to adapt the revised World-Readiness Standards (The 5 C’s). This year, the standards will be renewed to take into account global citizenship. QFI’s sponsorship will support the task force as they discuss standards and the development of performance indicators to be incorporated into the World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages.
“QFI has been providing sponsorship for the annual conference since 2011, and we are excited to continue our support for this year’s event,” said Maggie Mitchell Salem, Executive Director, QFI. “We are committed to providing resources to Arabic language educators and advancing global citizenship through education,” Salem added.
The Peninsula
