Ecd Educators Outlook on Early Years Curriculum and Pedagogy Fostering Children’s Holistic Development

The main purpose of the study was to explore educators' views on children's the early years' curriculum and pedagogy implemented in Pakistan. This research study is grounded in qualitative design i.e. Case study. The case included examining educators, the early years' and school managers' critical reflections on children's learning and development during the early years' education. This research study is first of its kind in the context of Pakistan as the early years teachers' views about their teaching practices have rarely incorporated in recent studies. The main finding of this study was that curriculum and pedagogies used in early years' program has never been concentrated earlier as potential research themes. Though many research studies have been conducted on the implementation of ECE programs, but not any specific study concentrated on matching curriculum goals with its implementation to facilitate children's holistic development. It was learnt that national curriculum framework 2007 is not followed in most ECE classes. The main reason was found that many practitioners i.e. Educators and managers have not seen or read it. Consequently, national philosophy is compromised while nurturing children holistically It is therefore recommended for teachers and educators to study the national and now provincial curriculum framework because it has set a benchmark as what to achieve and suggested how to achieve the goals.

Study of Watermarking for Image and Text Based Applications

Due to the rapid development of multimedia and communications technologies, issues related to data vulnerability and copyrights violation has increased. Digital content can be manipulated and reproduced effortlessly. Consequently, there is a considerable requirement for techniques aimed at content protection and authentication. Watermarking techniques can provide copyrights enforcement and authentication to prevent the illegitimate use of digital content. These techniques can be classified into two categories i.e. robust watermarking and reversible watermarking. In this thesis, research work is carried out in three phases. The first phase proposes a robust watermarking technique, which is resilient against the geometrical attacks. It is helpful in executing copyright protection. In robust watermarking, watermark is able to survive in case of attack on the digital content and can be successfully retrieved on extraction. The proposed technique exploits both the robust image feature points and local Zernike moments for embedding secret information. Delaunay tessellation is employed to divide an image into distinct triangular segments based on robust features identified using Harris detector. Zernike moments are calculated for each selected triangular segment, and then the watermark is embedded in the magnitude of Zernike moments using dither modulation. In the second phase, a reversible watermarking technique is proposed. Reversible watermarking is a special type of watermarking technique in which watermark is extracted along with restoration of the host media. Whereas, in case of robust watermarking, we are not able to retrieve the original image. Such watermarking system finds its application in medical and law enforcement, etc. The proposed watermarking scheme is based on pixel value ordering. Image is divided into sub blocks and each block is assessed using a threshold value. If the block belongs to the smooth category, watermark bit is embedded. In contrast, if it is classified as rough block, then the sub block is left unchanged. This technique does not require a location map since it uses histogram shifting. In third phase, the watermarking approaches and their applications for the protection DNA sequences are explored. In DNA watermarking, which is type of text xii watermarking; watermark information should be embedded in DNA sequence in such a way that it should not raise any functional disorders in the living organism. A watermark is embedded in a DNA sequence through synonymous substitution of nucleotides. The proposed approach ensures Amino Acid conservation, efficient utilization of the available embedding space in DNA sequences, and achieves mutation resistance by since it employs Reed-Solomon codes. The performance of these techniques has been evaluated on the standard test datasets. In some of the cases, the proposed watermarking approaches performed better than the recent existing approaches and showed comparable performance in other cases. The first technique finds its application in protecting the copyrights of the owner. The second watermarking technique can be used in applications where significant amount of data needs to be embedded e.g. information related to the patient in medical images. The third technique related to the DNA watermarking can be used for protection of DNA sequences and also to provide biological data storage as large amount of data can be stored.