Early Islamic World Timeline


570 - Muhammad is born in the city of Mecca.

610 - The religion of Islam begins when Muhammad receives the first revelations of the Quran.

622 - Muhammad and his followers move to Medina to escape persecution in Mecca. This migration becomes known as the "Hijrah" and marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar.

630 - Muhammad returns to Mecca and gains control of the city. Mecca becomes the center of the Islamic world.

632 - Muhammad dies and Abu Bakr succeeds Muhammad as leader of the Islam faith. He is the first of the four "Rightly Guided" Caliphs. This also marks the beginning of the Rashidun Caliphate.

634 - Umar becomes the second Caliph. The Islamic Empire expands during his rule to include much of the Middle East including Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and part of North Africa.

644 - Uthman becomes the third Caliph. He will create the standardized version of the Quran.

656 - Ali bin Talib becomes the fourth Caliph.

661 to 750 - The Umayyad Caliphate takes control after Ali is assassinated. They move the capital city to Damascus.

680 - Hussein, the son of Ali, is killed at Karbala.

692 - The Dome of the Rock is completed in Jerusalem.

711 - Muslims enter Spain from Morocco. They will eventually gain control of most of the Iberian Peninsula.

732 - The Islamic army pushes into France until they are defeated by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours.

750 to 1258 - The Abbasid Caliphate takes control and builds a new capital city called Baghdad. The Islamic Empire experiences a period of scientific and artistic achievement that will later be called the Golden Age of Islam.

780 - Mathematician and scientist al-Khwarizmi is born. He is known as the "Father of Algebra."

972 - Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt is founded.

1025 - Ibn Sina completes his encyclopedia of medicine called The Canon of Medicine. It will become the standard medical textbook throughout Europe and the Middle East for hundreds of years.

1048 - Famous poet and scientist Omar Khayyam is born.

1099 - Christian armies recapture Jerusalem during the First Crusade.

1187 - Saladin retakes the city of Jerusalem.

1258 - The Mongol army sacks the city of Baghdad destroying much of the city and killing the Caliph.

1261 to 1517 - The Abbasid Caliphate establishes the Caliphate in Cairo, Egypt. They have religious authority, but the Mamluks hold the military and political power.

1325 - Famous Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta begins his travels.

1453 - The Ottomans take the city of Constantinople bringing an end to the Byzantine Empire.

1492 - After being pushed back for centuries, the last Islamic stronghold in Spain is defeated at Granada.

1517 to 1924 - The Ottoman Empire conquers Egypt and claims the Caliphate.

1526 - The Mughal Empire is established in India.

1529 - The Ottoman Empire is defeated at the Siege of Vienna stopping the advance of the Ottomans into Europe.

1653 - The Taj Mahal, a tomb for the wife of the Mughal Emperor, is completed in India.

1924 - The Caliphate is abolished by Mustafa Ataturk, the first President of Turkey.

Timeline of Mohammed's Life

570 - Born in the town of Mecca. His name (Abu al-Qasim Muḥammad ibn Abd Allah ibn Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim ibn Abd Manaf ibn Qusai ibn Kilab) derives from the Arabic verb hamada, meaning "to praise, to glorify".

575 - Orphaned upon the death of his mother and placed in the protection of his paternal grandfather, then his uncle.

595 - Marries Kadijah - an older, wealthy widow. They had six children.

610 - Receives first revelation from God during the month of Ramadam.

613 - Took his message public, these would later become the Koran, Islam‘s sacred scripture.

622 - Emigrates with his followers from Mecca to Yathrib, soon to become known as Medina.

624 - The start of three major battles with the Meccans - the Battle of Badr (victory), 625 the Battle of Uhud (defeat), and 627 the Battle of the Trench (victory).

628 - The two sides signed a treaty recognising the Muslims as a new force in Arabia. Meccan allies breached the treaty a year later.

629 - Orders first raid into Christian lands at Muta (defeat).

630 - Conquers Mecca (along with other tribes).

631 - Consolidated most fo the Arabian Penunsula under Islam.

632 - Returned to Mecca to perform a pilgrimage.

632 - Dies in Medina after a brief illness. He is buried in the mosque of Medina.

Being in nature is good for learning, here’s how to get kids off screens and outside

Contrary to the belief we Aussies are a nature-loving outdoor nation, research suggests we’re spending less and less time outdoors. This worrying trend is also becoming increasingly apparent in our educational settings.

I have devoted the majority of my teaching and academic career to examining the relationship of people and nature. In the last few decades, society has become estranged from the natural world, primarily due to urban densification and our love affair with technological devices (usually located in indoor built environments).

Contact with nature can enhance creativity, bolster mood, lower stress, improve mental acuity, well-being and productivity, cultivate social connectedness, and promote physical activity. It also has myriad educational benefits for teaching and learning.

Outdoors and learning

The word “kindergarten” originated in the 1840s from the ideologies of German educator Friedrich Froebel and literally translates to “children garden”. Propelled by innate curiosity and wonder, a Froebelian approach to education is premised on the understanding students learn best when they undertake imaginative play and curious exploration.

Not only is outdoor play central to children’s enjoyment of childhood, it teaches critical life skills and enhances growth and development.

Contemporary research shows outdoor play-based learning can also help improve educational outcomes. A recent study found being outside stimulated learning and improved concentration and test scores.

Nature contact also plays a crucial role in brain development with one recent study finding cognitive development was promoted in association with outdoor green space, particularly with greenness at schools.

Autonomy and freedom in the outdoors is both liberating and empowering for kids. Burning off excess energy outdoors makes children calmer and fosters pro-social behaviours.

Teaching and learning in natural environments encourages self-mastery through risk taking, physical fitness, resilience, self-regulation, and student-centred discovery. Imagination is also enhanced by free, unstructured play.
How to get kids outdoors more

Children need outdoor play, but we’re not giving them enough opportunity. Countries such as Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway spend up to half the school day outdoors (rain, hail or shine) exploring the real-world application of their classroom learning. Here’s what parents and teachers can do to get kids outside more.

Taking the classroom outside

Children learn better when they can experience learning, rather than hearing it read from a text book. A study in Chicago used brain scans to show students who took a hands-on approach to learning had experienced an activation in their sensory and motor-related parts of the brain. Later, their recall of concepts and information was shown to have greater clarity and accuracy.

Practical lessons outside will stick better in young brains than learning theory from a book. This may be why in 2017, the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (ACARA) included outdoor learning in the national curriculum.

Options for teachers include taking the class outside to write poetry about nature, measuring the height of trees for maths classes, or de-stressing using mindfulness and breathing techniques while sitting quietly in the shade of a tree.

An upcoming initiative Outdoor Classroom Day is happening in schools across Australia on November 1. This is a day where teachers are encouraged to take their classes outside. Alternatively, parents can make a special effort to take their child to the local park, river or beach.

Less time on screens

Conversations with parents and teachers show they’re increasingly concerned about technology’s broader impact on their children, in both dramatic and subtle ways.

In many ways our hunger for technology has overridden our desire for direct human interaction. Screens compete directly with authentic channels of communication such as face-to-face interaction. To combat this, parents can assign one hour on and one hour off screens.

Parents are role models and so we also need to monitor our own time on screens and spend quality time with children detached from our digital devices.

The sad reality is technology can become a pseudo-parenting device, a form of pacifier to keep the kids busy. Instead, we can encourage our kids to engage in simple, unstructured play experiences.

These could include creating an outdoor scavenger hunt where they collect items from nature, building forts or dens incorporating inexpensive materials such as branches and old sheets or blankets, climbing trees, or laying on the grass and looking upwards into the sky to watch the cloud formations.

Other methods include making mud pies or sandcastles at the beach or in a sandbox; encouraging the collection of feathers, petals, leaves, stones, driftwood, twigs or sticks to make creative artworks on large sheets of paper; planting a garden with vegetable seedlings or flowers with your child (let them decide what will be planted); putting on a jacket and gumboots when it rains and jump in puddles together; or making an outdoor swing or billycart.

Nature offers a never-ending playground of possibilities with all the resources and facilities needed. If stuck, search on the web for wild play or nature play groups nearby as they are growing in popularity and number. But most importantly, reinforce the message that getting wet, having dirt stains on their clothes and getting their hair messy is good and adds to the fun.

#nature #childhood #play-learning #future-edu

>https://theconversation.com/being-in-nature-is-good-for-learning-heres-how-to-get-kids-off-screens-and-outside-104935

It’s Time to Rethink How We Are Educating Our Children
Intel

Educating for the Future

Elon Musk seems to be making headlines every day with his spaceships and solar panels and gigafactories and colonies on mars and secret tunnels and AI labs and self-driving cars. However, there is one thing he did that might be even more noteworthy yet did not draw nearly as much attention. He didn’t like the way his kids were being educated so he pulled them out of their fancy private school and started his own.

The school’s name is Ad Astra, meaning ‘to the stars’, and seems to be based around Musk’s belief that schools should “teach to the problem, not to the tools.” ‘Let’s say you’re trying to teach people how engines work. A traditional approach would be to give you courses on screwdrivers and wrenches. A much better way would be, here is an engine, now how are we going to take it apart? Well, you need a screwdriver. And then a very important thing happens, the relevance of the tool becomes apparent.’

Musk’s decision highlights a bigger issue, how we educate people needs to change. Education today really isn’t that much different from what it was a hundred years ago. It’s still classrooms crammed full of students all learning the same thing at the same pace from overworked, underpaid and under-appreciated teachers who spend thirty years teaching more or less the same thing.
Wikimedia Commons

Parents should be the most concerned. From the time kids are old enough to start school until they are independent enough to make their own decisions, parents consume themselves worrying about their child’s education. It made sense, after all getting your kids a good education was always thought to be the best thing you could do to assure them a bright future. And parents all around the world go to crazy lengths to do whatever they can to make sure their kids get the education they need. They’ll move houses to be in a better school district, spend thousands of dollars a year on after-school and summer programs, and hire tutors, all to make sure little Jimmy or Sally are prepared to face the world of tomorrow.

However for parents today things have gotten even more complicated. The world that the next generation will grow up in will be radically different from anything we have seen in the past. A world filled with artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, automation, virtual reality, personalized medicine, self-driving cars, and people on Mars. A world where people might not even have jobs and where society itself may be arranged in fundamentally different ways. How are parents, and society for that matter, supposed to know how to prepare them to succeed in a world that we cannot predict?

It starts by rethinking what a school is. Schools used to be the storehouses of human knowledge and going to school was the best way to learn anything. Now that is no longer the case, knowledge is no longer confined to dusty classrooms or old books. Thanks to the internet it is now accessible to anybody who wants it. All schools have to do is get them to want it.
Intel

The role of school should no longer be to fill heads with information, rather it should be a place that inspires students to be curious about the world they live in. Kids are born explorers, when they are young all they want to do is push boundaries and explore the limits of what they can do. Let’s not suffocate that curiosity by making them spend their childhoods preparing for one test after another while adhering to rigid school policies that stifle creativity and independent thought.

The ability to adapt and learn something new should be valued above all else. Gone are the days where you pick a profession and just do that one thing for the rest of your life. People will need to know how to learn something new multiple times over in their lives. Not only because it will be the only way you’ll still be able to contribute to society, but also because our knowledge of the world and who we are is progressing incredibly quickly. If the last time you learned anything new was when you were in school then you will be missing out on the new ways of understandings the world that are constantly opening up.

And this is not just something that we have to worry about for the younger generation, adults will also need to be re-educated as most of the skills they acquired in school will soon be obsolete.

Blueprint For Education In The 21st Century:

• Gone should be the days when kids are arbitrarily lumped together into classrooms full of students all forced to learn the same thing at the same pace. We have the ability to customize learning to fit each individual’s needs and desires and should do everything we can to take advantage of that ability. There already exist multiple online learning platforms, such as crash course, that teach a variety of subjects better than just about any teacher could.

• All active learning should be task driven. No more lessons where you jot down notes off a blackboard, rather students are assigned tasks to complete and given all the tools they might need to figure out how to solve the problem. (3d printers, virtual learning environments, interactive displays, a connection to labs and research facilities all around the world, etc.)

• Passive learning should not be rigidly structured. Students should be given a topic to learn about and a variety of educational materials to pick from to help them learn, it should then be up to them which they want to use. (podcasts, videos, books, virtual tours, etc.)

• Teachers become facilitators of learning. Rather than lecturing everyone, they go from student to student or group to group helping them figure out how to learn what they need to know. Teachers no longer need a deep understanding of the given topic but they should know how to learn about it. Students eventually should also be supplied with their own virtual learning assistant to answer any question they may have and help them stay on task.

• Classrooms themselves will need to be redesigned. No more square boxes with rows of desks, the classrooms of the future should be innovative spaces that promote curiosity while fostering creative social interaction with peers.

• The goal of education should never be to get an A or pass a test. Making students and parents obsess about grades and scores sucks away all the joy of learning. The goal should be to make students literate in all core subjects and fluent at a select few. Being able to do something that you couldn’t do before or finding a new way of understanding the world is far more rewarding than any score on a piece of paper ever could be.