Six Ways That JAM Creates “Good Screen Time” For Kids

http://ift.tt/2dZFdfe

JAM | Chalon Bridges

At JAM we think learning should be awesome so we’ve created online courses to help parents give their kids good screen time and kids get really good at something they love.

We invite kids to invent their own solutions, not memorize answers.

At JAM, we think learning should be awesome so we’ve created online courses to help parents give their kids good screen time and kids get really good at something they love. We keep creativity, curiosity and a love of learning alive in kids. We see informal education as a great incubator for what formal education could become.

1. Preparation for emerging skills
Cathy Davidson, a scholar of learning technology, concluded that 65% of children entering grade school this year will end up working in careers that haven’t even been invented yet. JAM prepares kids for skills that are just emerging in the world, skills that require facilities or permission that schools don’t have, and skills that simply make kids passionate. Kids shouldn’t have to wait to pursue what interests them.

2. Instant access to pros
Courses are developed by professionals with inspiring accomplishments in their field – we call them mentors. For example, our Minecraft course was developed by OMGChad, a master Minecraft player with 500,000 YouTube followers.Our singing course was developed by Madison Watkins, an emerging star who appears on this season of America’s Got Talent. Kids shouldn’t have to wait until grad school to learn from pros.

3. Active learning
We challenge kids to learn through trial and error, not lectures. We invite kids to invent their own solutions, not memorize answers. We design learning to be social, not solo.

At JAM, kids both learn from and teach each other. This results in drastically different levels of engagement. In 2015, most MOOCs had a completion rate of 15%. We’re hovering near 70%.

4. Good screen time
Screen time is a tricky thing. Parents want their kids to be fluent with technology and develop their own unique expertise to prepare for the next generation of careers. At the same time, parents don’t want their kids’ screen time to be a sedentary activity. JAM turns screen time into learning time.

Read More

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Other People’s Parenting: When (if Ever) to Interfere

http://ift.tt/2d6QESw

The New York Times | Michele Willens

It was an extreme example, but it struck a nerve.

Last week, at a Walmart in Texas, a female bystander spotted a man pushing a shopping cart with a crying child’s hair wrapped around the handle. The woman intervened, and eventually called the police for help. The incident set off a debate on when bystanders should say something about another parent’s discipline .

But what happens when safety is not at stake? Is there ever a right time to tell someone you don’t agree with a parenting decision?

Gretta Keene, a Brooklyn psychologist, had a friend who was adopting a child and was insistent on never telling the child. Having dealt professionally with patients on the sensitive subject, Ms. Keene was aware of potential issues up ahead. This was a close friend, so she offered free advice: “I thought there were other ways of handling the situation and just said her choice might have unintended consequences,” she recalled.

How was this received? “She reacted by cutting off our longtime relationship.”

John Jacobs, a psychiatrist and associate professor of family therapy at N.Y.U., said, “You are always taking a gamble when discussing others’ lives, especially when it comes to their children. It’s a dangerous place to go and usually doesn’t end well.”

Two couples I know in New York reached a tense standoff when one couple’s son decided to cancel a planned spring break with the other boy. Why? Because he got a “better” offer. The boys remained friends, though the parents did not.

Similar conflicts also play out onscreen. NBC’s limited series “The Slap” dealt with the repercussions of one child’s misbehavior at a party. The incident led to cruel accusations among the adults, broken friendships and eventually, a lawsuit. The premiere of this season’s “Blue Bloods” featured the paternal paragon, played by Tom Selleck, saying to an old friend, “I would never try to tell you how to show your love to your own son, but maybe you could try seeing him for what he’s become.” The response? “Go to hell, Frank!” In the recent film, “Captain Fantastic,” Viggo Mortensen’s character is raising five kids in such an unorthodox way that the children’s grandparents fight for custody.

Indeed, the most daunting emotional tightrope involves questioning the parenting of our own children-turned-parents. With the number of “grand-boomers” growing every year, this problem is not going away. Theirs, after all, is the generation that not only thinks it will be forever young, but too often feels it is forever right. “It’s a huge issue for them to deal with their own kids’ raising of children,” said Meryle H. Gellman, a Los Angeles therapist. “Each family has to find the way because the last thing you want is disconnection.”

Read More

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Artificial Intelligence Is The Next Giant Leap In Education

http://ift.tt/2dF7XLZ

Raconteur | Alex Wood

As schools seek to raise standards, help could come from an unlikely source – a virtual teaching assistant packed with the power of artificial intelligence

Glancing around school classrooms in 2016, it’s easy to miss just how far technology has transformed learning over the last decade. The desks, whiteboards and rows of chairs are the same, but so much else has changed that can’t be seen.

A third of Britain’s schools are asking students to bring their own tablets and laptops into the classroom now, coding has been on the national curriculum for three years, and more and more education is happening outside school through apps and digital services.

But these changes are just the start. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next giant leap in learning and, according to those working in the field of education and technology, we haven’t seen anything yet.

“Some technologies in the field of education have had the potential, but not the ability, to deliver or transform,” says Ian Fordham, chief executive of Edtech UK, the strategic body for education technology in Britain.

“The recent developments in AI and machine-learning are a major exception with the potential to revolutionise how young people learn, teachers and tutors teach, and how society drives forward learning in the future.”

If you don’t think AI is poised to change your world, maybe you haven’t spotted the signs. It’s not just Apple’s Siri getting better at telling jokes or ordering you a taxi, AI is recommending what you should buy on Amazon, listen to on Spotify and even writing the news articles you read (but not this one).

Benefit to humanity

Last year a group of the most respected tech entrepreneurs, including Tesla’s Elon Musk and PayPal’s Peter Thiel, pledged $1 billion to the creation of OpenAI, a non-profit “friendly” AI to benefit all humanity.

This year Google’s DeepMind took on and beat the best human Go player in the world, and Facebook launched a virtual assistant, powered by AI, called M.

The sheer wave of investment and energy being poured into AI is undeniable and on par with mankind’s greatest endeavours – and now it’s coming into the classroom. First, forget any notion of robotic teachers. In fact, human teachers will be vitally important in rolling out and developing AI in education.

“AI will not replace tutors, it will support them and it will guide them to be better teachers,” says Tom Hooper, founder of Third Space Learning.

Read More

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Age Appropriate Chores Chart For Children

http://ift.tt/2dDz9HB

Fatherly | Erik King

That Montessori chart on age appropriate chores that burns up the Facebooks every few years is back. It’s the one that suggests your 2-year-old should be setting the table; your 4-year-old should be vacuuming; your 6-year-old should be weeding the garden; your 8-year-old should be baking cookies; your 10-year-old should be mowing the lawn; and your 12-year-old should be doing the grocery shopping. If it popped up in your feed this week, you’ll know because of the sinking feeling of failure you suddenly get.

The idea that your kids love to learn how to help isn’t new — Maria Montessori founded her first school in Tarrytown, NY in 1911, based on the premise that kids learn from doing more than listening and that they innately want to feel needed and helpful. As an educational philosophy, it extends beyond the school, and suggests that household chores are perfect for the sort of goal setting and task mastering that raises self esteem while simultaneously teaching important life skills. Also not new: parents who feel inadequate in the face of the more-than-slightly idealized version of kids that Montessori sometimes seems based on.

For what it’s worth, research is on Montessori’s side when it comes to the whole chores thing. So, even if you don’t plan on having your kid hem your pants or deep clean the kitchen, it’s not the worst idea to get them on a regular schedule of contributing to the homefront. Here are a few tips that, while not classic Montessori, should be enough to let you weigh in on that Facebook thread with a smug, “Bobby’s learned to fetch his own diapers, wipes, and a cold beer every time he craps himself!” Mission accomplished.

This article originally appeared on Fatherly

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

5 Vital Skills Schools Are Failing To Teach Well Enough

http://ift.tt/2dDLDhK

Forbes | Bernard Marr

Used to be that reading, writing, and arithmetic were all you needed to get by and do well in the world — but that was also around the time that the vast majority of jobs were agricultural, factory work, or service jobs like maids and butlers.

While our society and jobs market has changed drastically since then, our education system has not.  Today, our education system focuses too much on learning facts by heart, rote memorization and basic writing and algebra — all things computers can do much better.

Remember asking your maths teacher why you couldn’t use a calculator in class, and hearing the reply that no one would walk around with calculators in their pockets every day?

Enter the smartphone.  That’s one excuse destroyed.

In my opinion, our schools are filling students’ heads with trivia rather than teaching them skills that are important and useful in the real world.  The popular U.S. TV show, Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? didn’t prove that adults were dumber than children, but rather that the adults have jettisoned much of the “knowledge” they learned in grade school as being unimportant in daily life.

In truth of fact, the people that will be able to compete for the best jobs in the future will be those who work with and alongside computers and AI, that are able to ask new questions, are creative and innovative and have a high degree of emotional intelligence and social skills (the things that actually make us human). I believe we need to focus more on those skills instead of spoon feeding our kids facts.

According to a survey by The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), these are some of the skills top employers say they are looking for in 2016 — and the ways in which our schools are failing to prepare students to fulfil them:

1. Ability to obtain and process information.

As data becomes more and more important and integral in the workplace, companies will be looking for employees who can hit the ground running when it comes to obtaining and processing that data. This means that it’s much less important to know facts and figures that our current education system emphasizes, than it is to possess the skills to locate and process any kind of information required.

Read More

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Next Target for IBM’s Watson? Third-Grade Math

http://ift.tt/2dQ1ldu

The New York Times | Elizabeth A. Harris

It knew enough about medical diagnoses and literature to beat “Jeopardy!” champions at their game, and has been put to use in cancer wards. Now, an IBMcomputer platform called Watson is taking on something really tough: teaching third-grade math.

For the past two years, the IBM Foundation has worked with teachers and their union, the American Federation of Teachers, to build Teacher Advisor, a program that uses artificial-intelligence technology to answer questions from educators and help them build personalized lesson plans.

By the end of the year, it will be available free to third-grade math teachers across the country and will add subject areas and grade levels over time.

“The idea was to build a personal adviser, so a teacher would be able to find the best lesson and then customize the lesson based upon their classroom needs,” said Stanley S. Litow, president of the IBM Foundation.

“By loading a massive amount of content, of teaching strategies, lesson plans, you’d actually make Watson the teacher coach,” Mr. Litow said.

The Watson technology began as a platform designed to answer questions, as it did on “Jeopardy!,” but it has been broadened and adapted. Oncologists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City have trained it to analyze research and a patient’s medical history to suggest potential treatment options to doctors. Watson for Oncology is now being used at more than 20 medical centers in Asia.

For teachers, one thing Watson will do is help them digest the Common Core standards and incorporate them into daily lessons.

The standards are learning goals, a map of what students should be able to do at a given level. Third graders should be able to measure area, for example, by counting out units, like square centimeters or square inches.

But rather than just listing a group of skills, Watson serves up the prerequisites those skills are built upon and a set of exercises to break down the standard.

Randi Weingarten, president of the teachers’ union, said that one of the challenges of the Common Core has been that teachers are asked to teach math in a way they were never taught it themselves. Watson, she said, should be able to help with that.

“We have moved from memorization and application of mathematical formulas to helping kids think it through,” Ms. Weingarten said. “If you don’t really, fundamentally understand that,” she said of the new methods, “it is root canal for an elementary-school teacher.”

Read More

 

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

What is “Metric Parenting”?

http://ift.tt/2d5bjW6

Fast Company | Reva Seth

Here’s How “Metric Parenting” Can Help Relieve Working-Parent Guilt

We track our fitness goals, nutritional intake, and spending, but few of us track our parenting activities in quite the same way.

“I am not going to be a good minister unless I’m happy at home and my family’s happy and there’s some balance,” she said.

WHAT “METRIC PARENTERS” DO DIFFERENTLY

There are several important lessons about work-life balance in McKenna’s decision, but one of them involves what I’ve called “metric parenting”—a way of using the same tactics to meet goals and deadlines at work in order to get more of what you want in your family life. Doing that well can help alleviate some of the guilt that can come with being a busy working parent.

While interviewing more than 500 parents for my second book (full disclosure: Catherine McKenna was one of those parents), I noticed many were doing something peculiar: Without always realizing it, the working parents I spoke to were deliberately setting goals like “being more present” or “cultivating my child’s curiosity” and turning them into tangible objectives they could work toward achieving. They regularly scheduled time to review their progress, and many of the parents with two or more children even had some way or another of tracking their engagement with each child.

What’s more, I found that over the five years I followed my interview group, the subset of “metric parenters” (as I’d come to think of them) seemed to report feeling happier with the ways they were balancing their families with their work. Interestingly, almost all were doing this unconsciously: They were simply taking what they knew to work in their professional lives and applying it in their personal lives.

It may sound like overkill, but if you’re already a successful professional, why not take the skills you’ve developed at work and put them to good use at home, too? Here’s are a few tips to help you apply the principles of metric parenting in your own life.

1. DEFINE YOUR GOALS

Just as you’d define what success looks like on the business, financial, or professional fronts, articulate what “being a good parent” means or looks like to you—at this point in your life and in your child’s, knowing that might shift over time.

Even easier, start with your parenting pain points: Maybe you feel like you’re on your phone too much during family time, or you wish you were more available for class trips. Whatever it is, get clear on what you’d like to change, or what you’d like to have more of.

Then actually write these goals down. If it isn’t documented somewhere, you’re less likely to follow through. And if you have more than one child, it can be helpful to segment out your targets by each child.

2. BREAK IT DOWN INTO ACTIONS

According to recent Pew research, many working parents feel they aren’t doing well enough when it comes to their families.

Metric parenting can be a good antidote. Once you’ve established your parenting goals, brainstorm three to four tactics or actions you could take toward each one. What would make you feel like you’re accomplishing those goals? Then schedule them in. McKenna, for instance, is scheduling four evenings at home with no online access for two hours.

Read More

by MindMake via MindMake Blog