Excellent Drawing Apps for Kids

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Educational Technology and Mobile Learning

Kids’ cognition craves drawing  because it provides it with an ample and unrestricted space to exercise its creative performance. With the advance of technology and more specifically mobile technology, drawing has taken unprecedented dimensions empowering kids to take their creative skills  to the next level. There are now a wide variety of great educational apps to help kids enhance their graphic expressivity through drawing and doodling. Below is a sample of some of the best educational drawing apps out there. Check them out and share with your kids. Enjoy

1- How to Draw – step by step Drawing Lessons and Coloring pages

‘Like a personal art teacher, it will teach you how to draw cartoons, animals, nature, anime and other different images and create amazing pictures. Specially for kids, How To Draw app offers Coloring pages where you can paint any ready image from the online Catalog. You may color an image following our example or just color it in a way you like.’

2- Drawing Pad

‘Drawing Pad is a mobile art studio for all ages! Create your own art using photo-realistic crayons, markers, paint brushes, colored pencils, stickers, roller pens and more! ’

3- Doodle Buddy – Paint, Draw, Scribble, Sketch – It’s Addictive!

‘Doodle Buddy Gold is the most fun you can have with your finger! Finger paint with your favorite colors and drop in playful stamps. Connect with a friend to draw together over the Internet.’

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

How Parents and Teachers Can Work Together For Powerful Learning Outcomes

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MindShift – Katrina Schwartz

MindShift readers are often intrigued by new ideas and strategies being tried around the country, but many educators are also parents and know the huge role parents play in education. This year some of our most popular posts have focused on how parents can set their children up for success, as well as when their involvement can hinder important development. As conversations at school and at home continue about the importance of having space to learn from failure, how can parents and educators become a stronger team as they work toward the mutual goal of successful, happy kids?

PARENTS ARE THE FIRST TEACHERS

When kids are young, it can feel like they need constant care (which they do!), but babies and toddlers are also building the architecture in their brains that will serve them throughout childhood. Parents have a unique opportunity to help their toddlers develop the emotional intelligencethat will aid them in academic and social settings for the rest of their lives.

Young kids often aren’t able to control their own emotions, which is why their tantrums can be fierce, but parents don’t have to stand by, powerless to these whims. Each tantrum is an opportunity for parents to help children learn to identify what they are feeling and why. They can also work to normalize emotions by admitting all people feel angry or sad or frustrated sometimes, while working on strategies to calm down. The strategies for a 3-year-old have to be simple and memorable, like taking a deep breath and counting to four when mad.

Books can also be a helpful way to talk about emotions when a child isn’t in the thick of feeling his own. Little kids can point out the emotions they see characters experience and talk about how he or she might have dealt with the situation. And, little kids aren’t too young to develop a mindfulness practice, which has been shown to improve self-regulation. For example, parent and child could take a “listening walk” around the block, focusing on the sounds in the present moment.

The way parents interact with their young children does more than build the emotional foundation for later success. It can also help kids build the specific pre-academic skills that will ease transition into school. The 30 million-word gap has become cliche now, but understanding the science behind “good talk” for infants and toddlers is an important way parents can contribute to their success.

Studies have shown that parents are more open to this message when they realize that how they interact with their child at a very young age affects the architecture of their brain. The messages imparted are as important, if not more so, than the act of talking itself. Kids need to be encouraged and praised for the processes they are engaged in, not just how cute or smart they are. And, even if a baby can’t yet talk, parents can create a sense of back and forth by responding to gurgles or smiles. Educators play a big role in making sure the parents they interact with know the science of talk and some of the simple strategies to make sure kids are developing a healthy capacity for language before starting school.

TEENAGE YEARS

There’s a lot of emphasis on what parents can and should do with their very young children because that’s a moment in development when a child’s brain is growing and changing in fundamental ways. But as every parent knows, getting through the first four years is just the start, and there are often parenting bumps along the road. One common rough patch comes when kids become teenagers, with all the hormones and tricky social dynamics that accompany it. Many parents feel lost at this stage, unable to interact with their child in the ways they used to, and unsure of how to best offer support to a prickly teen.

The good news is that teenagers need parenting just as much as younger kids, even if they don’t show their appreciation for it. Adolescence experts say parents are best off honoring their teen’s autonomy, while providing structure and support. It’s easy to see an adolescent not taking responsibility for something like homework and immediately jumping in to help. But it’s far better to set clear expectations and perhaps even schedules and routines that support strong study habits, without micromanaging the process.

Similarly, teens need space to try new things with the knowledge that there’s a safety net if they fail. This includes talking through choices and potential outcomes and then allowing the teen to make his own informed decisions. That doesn’t mean parents can’t jump in and provide extra support at times, but if a teenager never learns to be independent, he’ll have trouble later in life. And throughout it all, parents should continue to show warmth and love toward their teens. They may not seem to like it, but they still need it.

Cultivating supported autonomy will pay off once that teenager becomes a college student. University professors and deans increasingly report that their students don’t show the type of self-efficacy required to succeed. Instead, many students turn to their parents to fix even small problems that arise. Many parents look at an increasingly competitive world and see it as their parental duty to make sure their child has every possible opportunity. But actions that stem from love might actually be handicapping young adults.

NEW TEACHING STRATEGIES

While the discussion of “overparenting” struck a nerve with MindShift readers, the instinct to ward off any potentially damaging failures in a child’s life doesn’t come out of nowhere. Parents are feeling the pressure to make sure their kids get on the “right track” out of fear that any mistake will ruin a chance at a productive life. But where did that fear of failure come from? It’s a pervasive part of society and may even be learned in school.

Many educators feel they must move through curriculum at a breakneck speed to cover everything, leaving very little space for students toexperience struggle, failure, renewed attempts and ultimately success in a safe environment. Increasingly, however, educators are having productive conversations about encouraging a growth mindset, which focuses on how making mistakes grows the brain and provides fertile opportunities to learn.

This discussion of mistakes has led to some confusion. For example, not all mistakes lead to learning. The best kinds of mistakes for learning happen when a student is stretching outside her comfort zone. When trying something new most people will make mistakes, but with reflection and strategies to address the error, much can be learned. At other times a student might have an “aha mistake” when she completed the task correctly, but realized she should have done it differently because of new information. Both these types of mistakes grow the brain and require self-reflection and renewed effort. But learning from mistakes doesn’t happen automatically.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

6 Factors of Classroom Gamification

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TeachThought – Nellie Mitchell

I was 11 the year my summer camp director transformed the regular schedule, procedures, and lingo that we were used to—into the most memorable, enriching experience I had ever encountered at that point in my life.

I had no idea that he had ‘gamified’ the week; I just knew that it was the best summer ever. Instead of grouping us by numbers, we were named after the Greek alphabet. We competed daily against the other groups in volleyball, softball, kickball, and on the final night —a chariot and Olympic flame opened an epic Olympic Game contest at midnight.

The director, or ‘game master’ as we were inclined to call him, even made everyone reset the clocks and watches—so we never knew what the real time was, the entire schedule was set on some sort of crazy alternate schedule. Now I realize that it probably allowed him to sleep in and us to stay up later, but we were none the wiser.

Daily we played games, wrote skits, went swimming, and competed for cleanest cabins. We did all the regular stuff, but it was more fun because there were rules and boundaries and points and collaboration and competition and a clear, mutual understanding of goals and performance and criteria for success.

As a student, I got to learn more about the power of ‘gamifying’ something, and what effect it had on learners.

• Gamification is about transforming the environment and regular activities into a kind of game. It is about creating a game out of things that are not normally thought of that way.
• Gamification reinforces content, but also has the potential to profoundly impact classroom management.
• Gamification is about collaboration and teamwork. Sometimes students are battling each other, and sometimes they are working together, but they are always learning!
• Gamification is a long-term, consistent series of events that require quite a bit of prep work by the teacher, but has the potential to reinforce content and engage all learners in new ways.

Getting Started With Gamification

I have no doubt that the camp director spent hours analyzing the schedule, creating the concept, and modifying our basic procedures to meet the needs of the game. I hope he knows how worth it his effort was. That camp experience has been in the back of my mind ever since I started teaching middle school. I teach art and I’m always looking for ways to make it more relevant, current and enriching for every student, not just the gifted artists.

When the technology integration coach in my school district handed me a copy of The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game by Lee Sheldon, I was enthralled. The book was an easy read— cover to cover in just a few days. Lee Sheldon’s students are learning content through game play. College level coursework with students enrolled in a class devoted to designing video games.

In the book, Lee initiates game play in the syllabus. He analyzes how he made changes to the game through trial and error over the course of many semesters. Most of the ‘gaming’ was fantasy, special terminology used to jazz up regular coursework, with plenty of buy-in from students who were interested in gaming of all kinds, from athletic competition to board games to mobile, PC, and console-based video games.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Can an Immersive Video Game Teach the Nuances of American History?

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MindShift – Katrina Schwartz

The students in Scott Jackson’s eleventh grade American History class have almost no common knowledge about the country’s early beginnings and important moments. His students at Brooklyn International High School are recent immigrants to this country who are learning English and how to be American school students at the same time. Jackson uses the immersive role-playing game Mission US to give his students a common experience of what it would have been like to live during important historical moments. The game is designed to encourage students to empathize with the game’s characters, make connections to their own experiences and ultimately remember what happened in history.

“It levels the playing field,” Jackson said. “Everyone is able to see the history, jump into the history and describe what they’re seeing.” Even if one student can read and understand 95 percent of what’s happening in the game and another student only gets 15 percent because his language skills are less developed, they can each talk about what they saw in the game. The game becomes a shared experience to discuss the choices each made in the game and how those choices changed their experience of the historical moment.

Mission US currently has four missions based around different important points in history. Jackson has found the game to be such aneffective stand-in for a textbook that he structures several units around the game’s themes, using them as the basis of inquiry that branches far beyond the core narrative of the missions, and most importantly, giving his students lots of chances to use their language skills.

The first Mission called “For Crown or Colony?” is set in pre-Revolutionary War Boston and leads up to the Boston Massacre. Students take on the identity of Nat Wheeler, an apprentice in a printshop. As they play, students make choices in the game that build up a personality for their version of Nat Wheeler. Aside from the specific knowledge about the events of the Boston Massacre, the game asks students to consider how history changes when told from different perspectives.

“When students experience the Boston Massacre in the world of the game, students in the same classroom may have very different experiences of the same event,” said Chris Czajka, senior director of education at WNET on an edWeb webinar about games and learning. WNET, the public television station in New York City, produces Mission US in collaboration with video game designers at Electric Funstuff.

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Silicon Valley Funds Homeschooling

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Penelope Trunk

After a recent interview he gave while in Beijing, the news that Elon Musk of Tesla, SpaceXand PayPal created his own school for his children spread all over the internet.

My husband works at SpaceX, so I have known about this school for a while, but all my husband would tell me was that there was a school called Ad Astra that was going to be for the children of SpaceX employees.  My interest and curiosity had been piqued.

I wondered “What is this school he created for his kids?  Is he homeschooling them?  Where is it located?”  Since my husband was a dead end, I, in typical INTJ form (read: obsessive), became a detective searching for clues to solve a mystery.  I found out all the gossipy details through several reliable SpaceX sources and, through my interactions within the private school community in Los Angeles got more information about why the school was formed in the first place.

It is very tough to get into an elite private school here in Los Angeles. I’m sure it is even more difficult to get accepted to a private school in NYC, but it is still hard enough here that not everyone gets into their school of choice, regardless of how much money one is willing to throw at the school.

With only a set amount of slots available for each grade every year, unless you are a celebrity like Beyoncé who can get her kid into an exclusive preschool midyear, most parents of school-aged children find themselves on a waiting list. Then they must find a backup school for their child to attend while they wait to get a spot in their first choice school.

So why did this billionaire make a different choice for his children?

Elon had his boys enrolled at Mirman School which is a private school in Los Angeles. Not only is it difficult to get a spot in this particular school, but a prospective student must also have an IQ of 145+ as documented via psychological testing to even apply there. After wading through its rigorous admissions process and giving school a chance, he came to the same conclusion that many of us who are unschooling did. School is no longer appropriate.

It is a strange feeling for a parent to realize that they have a divergent child on their hands, and they can’t really grasp it until after sending their “special snowflake” off to school with the masses, blindly following social convention without any further thought or examination as to why this is. Once you discover that the burden of someone else’s schedule and agenda makes other areas of life difficult to work around, how standards-based education conflicts with your own view of what learning is, or your children start to despise school, then it can be a hard reality shock when you realize that something needs to change.

I’m sure it didn’t take long for Elon and his children’s mother, Justine Musk whom I love to follow on Twitter, to collectively make the decision to pull their kids from this highly regarded private school and try something else. So he withdrew his kids and kept them with him at work while he tried to find an alternative for them.

Having his kids with him for the majority of the day and observing that they could learn in a self-directed manner allowed him to determine that with the way schools are currently designed, no school could accommodate his children.

So how does a billionaire, eccentric, formerly bullied, and possibly-on-the-spectrum parent unschool?

First, by bringing his kids to work and letting them engage in self-directed learning in a SpaceX conference room, then recruiting a teacher away from his kids’ former school, purchasing a facility steps away from his mansion, and throwing buckets of money at the teacher.

Next, by selectively inviting some children of SpaceX employees and a few of his kids’ friends who are in an age range close to his own kids who can contribute to the small classroom/homeschool feel, and letting loose with all sorts of hands-on projects and experiments.

Finally by naming it Ad Astra, meaning “To the Stars”.  No grade levels exist at this school, and everyone learns based on their aptitude and ability versus a one-size-fits-all assembly line model, like one would find in traditional schools.

With a growing consensus among intellectuals, technologists, and futurists that traditional US public schools in their current state are becoming irrelevant, something needs to change.

As much as I respect the older progressive models of education like Waldorf, with proponents such as Alfie Kohn and many Google Executives loving to sing Waldorf’s praises, I hope to see more parents either begin unschooling or taking Elon’s approach through some sort of collaborative unschool-lite effort.

A Waldorf philosophy has its limitations. While vastly better than a traditional education, the benefits of restricting media and technology seem tenuous in the Digital Age. To use Elon’s example, if his kids want to learn about engines, an engine is acquired and brought to their school and they start to deconstruct it while learning how to use the appropriate tools along the way. It is hands-on, visual, tactile learning that one can use in their unschooling home.

I’m sure most of us do not have millions of dollars to throw at people to engage our children, but we can still find a way to give our kids the same or similar experiences. Unschooling offers the advantages of the older progressive style of education and, when infused with technology and a healthy self-directed approach, can create an optimal learning environment.

Unschooling is not just for the wealthy. Anyone who has a child with an innate and intrinsic motivation to learn, is an autodidact, is self-directed, or has the desire to explore, discover, and develop their passions can unschool.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

3 Hacks that Solve Big School Problems

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Cult of Pedagogy – Jennifer Gonzalez

One afternoon late last year, my friend Mark Barnes and I were talking about some really creative ways teachers were solving problems in their schools. These ideas were so impressive because they required virtually no money, minimal administrative sign-off, and resources that were already available. And yet these solutions were incredibly powerful, solving problems that had been around for years with just a few small changes.

They reminded us of the Life Hacks we’d seen online, ideas that make you shake your head over how simple and effective they are. The kind of ideas that, when you learn them, you wonder why you never thought of them yourself.

Before long, we decided these ideas had to be shared. Fast-forward to now and the publication of our new book, Hacking Education: 10 Quick Fixes for Every School. In the book, we share 10 fantastic ideas that you can implement without a lot of money, without rounds of committee meetings, without changing policy or fundraising or any of that. You can just do them.

For each hack, we give you a quick overview, describe how you can start putting it into action tomorrow, then follow that up with a blueprint for full implementation of the hack. Next, we talk about the kinds of pushback you’re most likely to get when you introduce this idea in your school and how you can thoughtfully respond to it. Finally, we tell the story of a real educator who is currently using the hack in their own practice.

To give you a small taste of what we offer in this book, I’ll give you a glimpse of the first three hacks right here.

Hack 1: Meetings in the Cloud

Face-to-face meetings consume ridiculous amounts of teacher and administrator time. But they don’t have to; not anymore. Now you can “meet” without having to be in the same place at the same time, giving everyone more flexibility and cutting way back on the time we all spend listening to things that aren’t relevant to us.

Here’s how this hack works: Instead of gathering in a room at a designated time to discuss things, the way you would in a traditional meeting, you’d use a backchannel tool like Voxer or TodaysMeet, which allow you to have ongoing conversations with large or small groups without having to be in the same place at the same time.

What about handouts? What about paperwork? You’d use a cloud-based storage system like Dropbox or Google Drive to store documents, setting up shared folders that everyone can access. (How do you do that? Watch this quick tutorial on sharing Google Drive folders from Anson Alexander.) The important thing would be to set up a system in which all participants know which documents are for which meeting and what they need to do with them. Setting up a separate sub-folder for each “meeting” can help facilitate that.

Hack 2: Pineapple Charts

Many of us have discovered how much we can grow from observing other teachers. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to get the timing right: You rarely know exactly which teachers are doing what, at what time. Your own limited time complicates this even further—most teachers don’t want to waste a whole planning period going to someone else’s room if they’re not going to get anything out of it.

A Pineapple Chart solves this. Using the pineapple—a traditional symbol of welcome—as a kind of “brand,” the chart is simply a board you hang in the faculty lounge, beside teacher mailboxes, or any place teachers go on a regular basis. On this board is a chart, including all the days of the week and all class periods. Teachers use this chart to advertise interesting things they are doing in their classrooms on specific days or times. For example, if a drama teacher is rehearsing scenes from Our Town Tuesday and Wednesday, he could put that up on the chart. If a science teacher is doing a virtual dissection on Friday morning, she could put that on the chart. When many teachers share their activities, what you get is a big, robust menu of classroom experiences to choose from, open-door lessons other teachers are invited to stop by and see.

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@Ideas Factory – Julian S Wood

Yesterday I read a tweet from the excellent Carl Hendrick signposting an article from the Atlantic website called ‘The Myth of the Minecraft Curriculum’ It’s sub-heading was entitled-

“In reality, the computer program has about as much inherent educational value as an overhead projector.”

I am not going to bore you with an in-depth analysis of a frankly wide-of-the-mark article. But you can guess the basic premise, the very popular sandbox PC,Console and IOS game Minecraft “is not intrinsically educational.”….

I’d also heard one particular nameless, high profile blogger and tweeter, at a national educational event reduce education technology to “all kids do on the internet is go on Facebook”.

Obviously if you or your kids don’t play Minecraft (which the writer of the article doesn’t) and if your only experience of teenagers is them talking incessantly about Facebook (well it is a social network!) then your knowledge is going to be based on experience as tiny as a gnat’s chuff.

I replied to Carl’s tweet with this-

“Hows about co-operatively building in Minecraft on Xbox with 6 friends chatting with 1 while face timing on iPad with another.”

Followed  swiftly with-

“…..That’s my nephew playing Minecraft-don’t think he does it for his Maths homework but is definitely learning something.”

Let’s go into this in detail, after school, my nephew and his friends build gigantic structures co-operatively, together. Whilst verbally instructing and helping each other on XBox Live and Facetiming on their iPads. They search the internet for tips and watch ‘how-to’ videos (created and shared by other Minecraftians) in their own time, they then teach each other how to ‘craft’ certain materials, which combinations of these materials create new items and where the locations in the game are to find them.

For me this type of engagement is the zenith of learning, an informal fellowship striving to achieve a common goal, through co-operation, social learning and research.

At the time of writing 18,647,546 people have bought PC/Mac version of the game, not adding the countless millions who have bought the IOS and XBox versions. So it doesn’t take the greatest leap of imagination to think that many more kids would be playing Minecraft in the same way my nephew and his friends do.

This is just one game-all the cool kids have moved on to newer challenges like Garry’s Mod and Terraria.

And it’s nothing new-in 2011 I wrote an article about how my brother wrote a Nintendo Wii game with help from global collaborators and social learning.

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What Makes an ‘Extreme Learner’?

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MindShift – Linda Flanagan

When Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski was dissecting a sheep’s heart during an eighth-grade science class, she had an epiphany that changed her life. “That heart told the story of anatomy and physiology!” she said.

Realizing that science is best communicated through stories, Cueva-Dabkoski, now just 19 years old, went on to explore beetles in China. She’s now at Johns Hopkins University, and continues to do research during breaks.

Cueva-Dabkoski is considered an “Extreme Learner,” a designation applied to just 12 individuals by the Institute for the Future, for her radical and gutsy approach to learning. Extreme Learners are self-directed, wide-ranging in their interests, comfortable with technology, and adept at building communities around their interests.

“Extreme learners aren’t so different from everybody else,” said Milton Chen, a fellow at the Institute for the Future and advocate for education reform. “We picked people who are extreme in their passion for learning.” They are also willing to go their own way when traditional educational institutions interfere with their pursuits.

Thomas Hunt, for example, another designated “extreme learner,” dropped out of high school when he was 14 to work on cancer research. Always interested in science, he found high school stultifying and needlessly time-consuming. Kids of varied interests were thrown together and taught in “the cookie-cutter method,” he said. After he left, Hunt found like-minded learners when he became one of 20 Thiel Fellows, formerly known as “20 Under 20,” which paid him $100,000 to drop out of school for two years and pursue his studies. “For some kids who have a vision of what they’re interested in, high school is not for them,” he said.

This was also true for Marc Roth, another extreme learner who dropped out of high school three times and never finished his community college education. (He earned his high school equivalency degree in three weeks.) Today, Roth is the founder of the Learning Shelter, a 90-day training program that teaches homeless people high-tech manufacturing skills. Roth is 40, and his improbable path to the Learning Shelter included delivering pizzas, programming and consulting in IT, sailing the seas on a cruise ship, and starting his own business. When that business collapsed, and Roth’s net worth fell from $21 million to nothing, he moved to San Francisco and lived in his car. When his car was broken into, Roth decamped to a homeless shelter for five months.

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Check Out These LEGO Creations and Turn Your Imaginations Into Reality!

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Trending Post – Richa Dwivedi Sharma

Do you remember playing with Legos? The multi-color building blocks that truly fascinated us while we were kids. It has inspired the kids to give life to their vision. With these small building blocks, the kids can plan an entire city, invent a new machine or shape a completely different world. But to your surprise, Legos can even be beneficial for the adults.

Imagination does not have boundaries and this is the fact that proved Lego to be much more than just simple playing tools. Moreover, once you have started using it in creative ways, there will be no end to the wonders of Lego. These small building blocks can be turned into useful and surprising tools. You can have Legos on the dining table, kitchen, and even in bathrooms. Now, if you are thinking that how it can be possible, then let me show you some of the most surprising ways of using Lego in your daily life. These Lego creations will definitely impress you.

1Lego Phone Dock

Most of the time, when you reach your home or office, you just throw the phone on the table, sofa or bed. And if you are unlucky someday, then one of your heavy weighted friends may throw his weight on your precious little device. To avoid this, you should consider using a phone holder.

For this, you do not even need to go to the market. The Legos present in your kid’s drawer will simply do the job for you. Take the Legos and form it into the desired shape, just as it’s in the image. The color selection depends on you, so use your creative mind and make a ravishing phone holder. You can place it on the dining table, office table or the side table of the bed. Moreover, wait till one of your friends visit, and praise it.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

10 Ways to Discover Minecraft

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Quartz – Sonali Kohli

In what looks like a small startup office in a New York financial district building earlier this year, a roomful of teenagers examined lines of code projected on to a classroom wall. The code made up Beyonce’s Twitter page, and the teens were figuring out how to collect and organize it.

These high-school students gave up four hours each Saturday for three months this winter to learn how to build web apps at the Flatiron School. Their parents shelled out $2,500 for 12 weeks of lessons. There’s a shortage of coders in the US, and schools like this are trying to be the solution.

Information technology was one of the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields with the most job postings (pdf) in the US in 2013, and job postings requiring coding skills stayed open the longer than most (pdf, pg. 35). A national non-STEM job opening is filled in about 33 days, compared to 56 days for jobs that require programming skills and 65 days for mobile developing, said Matt Sigelman, CEO of career analytics firm Burning Glass.

There’d be more people to fill these jobs if there were more computer science graduates, and there’d be more graduates if more people could start the subject in high school. And yet it’s difficult to find a high-quality computer science class in American high schools, let alone a programming class.

Hence the demand for places like the Flatiron School. It’s good for teens who already know they want to learn programming, or those who have parents nudging them toward it. But relying on schools like this one assumes that people who want to code will seek it out and have the money to pay for lessons.

Why there isn’t enough computer science in schools

There are many reasons why American schools are poor at teaching coding—so many that the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) published a 75-page report (pdf) enumerating them. The biggest is that the public school system is decentralized. Most public schools follow national teaching guidelines—the Common Core—and complete standardized tests based on those, but US states and local bodies make classroom-level decisions.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Missing Pieces in Education Technology Innovation

Games That Teach As Well As They Play

Why and How to Teach Your Kids Mindfulness

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Parents Magazine – Ellen Sturm Niz

Practicing mindfulness can help kids learn to focus, manage stress, regulate emotions, and develop a positive outlook. Here’s how to teach them the skill.

Last year, my daughter started learning mindfulness in her third-grade class at school. The students would sit in a circle, close their eyes, and quietly take notice of their own thoughts and what was happening around them. Each session, led by Danielle Mahoney, the mindfulness educator and literacy coach at P.S. 212Q in Jackson Heights, Queens, had a different lesson: mindful seeing, mindful hearing, mindful breathing, or heartfulness (or sending kind thoughts to others). The idea was that learning these techniques would help the young students focus better in school and be less stressed out.

Though at first my daughter resisted the mindfulness—she said the singing bowl they rang to start the sessions hurt her ears and gave her a headache—she slowly came around. She began enjoying the sessions and discovering they helped her focus. Since she began using the skill at school, I’ve noticed she is better able to center herself at home, too. When she starts freaking out about something, she is able to stop, take a breath, and shift her perspective to come up with a less emotional—and more productive—reaction. For a very sensitive and dramatic kid, this is a major development.

“The greatest impact I’ve seen so far with the students I have worked with has been an increase in compassion for themselves and for others,” says Mahoney, who is certified in mindfulness teaching by Mindful Schools. “They learn how to pause and respond to situations rather than react. They have a better understanding of the ways that their brains work and have an increased sense of curiosity and wonder about their own thoughts, emotions, and body sensations.”

The children also seem to have better coping skills and communication skills, adds Mahoney, who has taught the practice to more than 300 students. “They have learned to be present—for themselves and for others.”

The Benefits of Practicing Mindfulness

The benefits of mindfulness are not just anecdotal: A growing body of scientific research shows its positive effects on mental health and well-being. Practicing mindfulness has been shown to improve attention and reduce stress as well as increase one’s ability to regulate emotions and feel compassion and empathy. Mindfulness also is widely considered an effective psychotherapy treatment for adults, children, and adolescents with aggression, ADHD, or mental health problems such as anxiety.

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Taking the First Steps Towards Teaching With Video Games

Minecraft Used To Teach Children Molecular Chemistry

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BBC News – Education and Family

Virtual world-building game Minecraft, played by tens of millions of children worldwide, could be used in schools to teach pupils chemistry.

A group of Hull University students created an educational version of the game that allows players to explore specially created molecular structures and understand chemistry.

The aim is to engage young scientists in a fun and interactive way.

Minecraft players use building blocks to create structure and landscapes.

They are also encouraged to collect treasure and many other items.

‘Fiendishly difficult’

The students developed the project with the help of the university’s Minecraft expert, Joel Mills, and senior lecturer in biological chemistry, Dr Mark Lorch.

Dr Lorch said: “Minecraft is a fabulous tool for exploring structures of buildings, landscapes and even anatomy.

“So why not molecules? We showed it to a class of children the other day and there were lots of wows and gasps.

“This just really grabs their attention. It is a really novel way of engaging them and delivering information to them.”

As well as structures and molecules to explore, the students have created a host of other surprises for children to roam around and find.

Dr Lorch said: “You can just explore and read the info about the molecules. But there are also a whole load of treasure chests dotted around filled with goodies, puzzles and quiz books.

“Some are easy to find, others are fiendishly difficult. If you locate them all then you’ll probably have learned a fair bit of chemistry on the way.”

Outreach

Dr Lorch, who also has a role to engage young people in science, added: “If I’ve given them this information in a Minecraft world and shown them how to access it, then they are much more likely to go and find out about it than if I have given it in a PowerPoint presentation.”

The Hull team is currently trialling the game, called MolCraft, in a number of secondary schools in London as part of various university outreach projects.

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Many Children Under 5 Are Left to Their Mobile Devices

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The New York Time – Catherine Saint Louis

A small survey of parents in Philadelphia found that three-quarters of their children had been given tablets, smartphones or iPods of their own by age 4 and had used the devices without supervision, researchers reported on Monday.

The survey was not nationally representative and relied on self-reported data from parents. But experts say the surprising result adds to growing evidence that the use of electronic devices has become deeply woven into the experience of childhood.

Dr. Michael Rich, the director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children’s Hospital, said he suspected that exposure to mobile devices among children elsewhere “is not all that different” from what was described by the parents in Philadelphia.

“Based on my observations of families with whom I work, I would not be surprised if these levels of device ownership and use were similar in many families,” he said.

According to a nationwide survey by Common Sense Media, 72 percent of children 8 or younger used a mobile device in 2013, for example, compared with 38 percent in 2011.

It was not clear how often the parents had bequeathed old devices as digital hand-me-downs or had bought new ones.

“That’s huge,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the survey, which was published in the journal Pediatrics. “If children are sitting by themselves glued to digital candy, we simply don’t know what the consequences are for their early social development.”

In the survey, 350 parents, who were largely low-income African-Americans, filled out a questionnaire while visiting Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia.

One-third of the parents of 3- and 4-year-olds said their children liked to use more than one device at the same time, noted Dr. Hilda Kabali, a pediatrician and the lead author of the survey.

Seventy percent of the parents reported allowing their children, ages 6 months to 4 years old, to play with mobile devices while the parents did housework, and 65 percent said they had done so to placate a child in public.

A quarter of the parents said they left children with devices at bedtime, although bright screens disrupt sleep. “They are putting their child to sleep in an environment that keeps them from going to sleep,” Dr. Rich said.

According to the parents, nearly half of the children younger than 1 used a mobile device daily to play games, watch videos or use apps. Most 2-year-olds used a tablet or smartphone daily.

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Is Your Teen Using Adult Dating Apps?

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Common Sense Media – Polly Conway

Unless you’re single, you might not be familiar with dating apps such as Tinder, where users can quickly swipe through prospective dates. But it’s likely your teen knows all about these apps — even though they’re mostly designed for adults. According to the company’s own estimates, about 7 percent of Tinder’s users are age 13 to 17.

Although adults use these apps both for casual hookups and for scouting out more long-term relationships, they’re risky for teens. For starters, although many of the apps aren’t intended for them, it’s easy for savvy teens to get around registration-related age restrictions. Secondly, adults can pose as teens and vice versa. Location-sharing increases the potential for a real-life meeting; less dangerous but still troubling is the heavy emphasis on looks as a basis for judgment.

It’s possible that teens are only testing boundaries with these apps. Many are eager to be on the same wavelength as their 20-something counterparts, and the prospect of meeting someone outside their social circle is exciting. And with so much of their social life happening online, teens feel comfortable using apps to meet people. But these apps are not a safe way for them to explore dating.

If you learn your teen is using dating apps, take the opportunity to talk about using social media safely and responsibly — and discuss what’s out of bounds. Keep lines of communication open; talk to them about how they approach dating and relationships and how to create a healthy, fulfilling one — and note that they usually don’t start with a swipe.

Below are some of the adult dating apps that teens are using.

Skout. This flirting app allows users to sign up as a teen or an adult. They’re then placed in the appropriate peer group, where they can post to a feed, comment on others’ posts, add pictures, and chat. They’ll get notifications when other users near their geographic area join, and they can search other areas by cashing in points. They receive notifications when someone “checks” them out but must pay points to see who it is.
What parents need to know. If your teens are going to use a dating app, Skout is probably the safest choice, if only because it has a teens-only section that seems to be moderated reasonably well. However, ages aren’t verified, making it easy for a teen to say she’s older than 18 and an adult to say she’s younger.

Tinder. Tinder is a photo and messaging dating app for browsing pictures of potential matches within a certain-mile radius of the user’s location.
What parents need to know. You swipe right to “like” a photo or left to “pass.” If a person whose photo you “liked” swipes “like” on your photo, too, the app allows you to message each other. Meeting up (and possibly hooking up) is pretty much the goal.

Badoo. This adults-only app for online dating-style social networking boasts more than 200 million users worldwide. The app (and the companion desktop version) identifies the location of a user by tracking his or her device’s location and then matches pictures and profiles of potentially thousands of people the user could contact in the surrounding area.
What parents need to know. Badoo is definitely not for kids; its policy requests that no photos of anyone under 18 be posted. However, content isn’t moderated, and lots of sexual images show up as you browse.

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What To Do When Your Kid Asks: ‘Is Santa Real?’

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Fatherly – Jonathan Stern

It’s going to happen one day — your child will come home from school and say that some older kid on the playground told him that Santa wasn’t real. Your first instinct may be to find out where this Son of a Grinch lives and hand deliver him a lump of coal. But that wouldn’t be in the Christmas spirit, would it?

Dale McGowan is the author of ” In Faith and In Doubt: How Religious Believers and Nonbelievers Can Create Strong Marriages and Loving Families”, and he was in your spot not too long ago. The best advice is what you intrinsically know: “The appropriate response is to tell the truth,” says McGowan.

Don’t worry, you won’t destroy their sense of childlike wonder. If anything, the fact that they asked means that they’re developing a healthy perspective on reality — so … already a step ahead of Donald Trump!

You Won’t Have to Answer This Question For A While
No 2-year-old wanders up to their parents and asks point-blank if Santa Claus is real. They’ll usually start by asking a lot of questions about the chimney width, flying sleigh physics, and Santa’s shady employment practices.

Eventually their curiosity will lead them to that final need-to-know answer. So, what then? “You reward their willingness to know the answer by giving them the answer,” says McGowan. “What they’re indicating at that point is that they’re ready for it and you should say ‘Congratulations, you figured it out.'”

Can Kids Handle the Truth?
Contrary to what you may think, children are less disappointed with the fact that Santa Claus isn’t real that you may think. McGowan says that kids are usually relieved to know, or excited to be on the inside of this worldwide secret (just like the Lizard People — but you’ve said too much). He’s also found that older kids are good about keeping the Santa secret for younger kids. Because with great yuletide power, comes great yuletide responsibility.

Don’t Propagate The Myth Too Enthusiastically
By all means, leave out milk and cookies for Santa, but don’t start planting evidence for the jolly fat man like you’re the North Pole’s LAPD. “Doing that is more heavy-handed and deceptive,” says McGowan. “That’s when kids can feel betrayed.”

Don’t Threaten With The Naughty List
When McGowan’s daughter started doubting, his son told her that said Santa would leave coal her stocking if she didn’t believe. Sure, as a parent part of you want to use this bit of Santa-lore to keep your child on the straight and narrow. Don’t do it. When your children do find out that there’s no Santa, they’ll feel manipulated. Instead, walk back the whole idea of a naughty and nice list. If your kids are rotten, you’re not going to cancel Christmas. If they’re extra nice, that’s a little creepy. Plus being punished by an all-seeing, all-knowing entity is better left to organized religion.

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Did Your Parents Impose Restrictions On Technology?

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Gizmodo – Kaila Hale-Stern

There’s an ongoing debate over how much tech exposure is OK for kids, and new tools created to control their levels of consumption. I’m curious: did you grow up with rules governing technology use? Or if you’re a parent, do you set strict guidelines yourself?

I always felt lucky not to have a home situation where parental controls were placed over my Internet usage. I did encounter frustration with how much I was online, even in the dialup days. I tried to sabotage a landline phone that lit up “line 2” when I was connected, since it was often at 2am. But I wasn’t really restricted, and arguably that early adoration for the Internet is correlated with my continuing interests and occupation.

Of course, we’re in another era now, where toddlers can navigate iPads with better dexterity than many adults. The world of online connectivity has greatly expanded in scope and size. I respect that some parents think it’s important to establish guidelines for proper usage, even if I disagree with strict restrictions and monitoring data—teenagers online deserve privacy too.

But what about you? Are you a parent facing this very issue? Did you grow up with limitations on how you could use technology?

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The Future of Education Demands More Questions, Not Answers

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edSurge –  Jay Silver

Technology alone can’t educate students. It’s not some mystical, magical ingredient one sprinkles over core curricula like salt on a meal. The magic is inside the child. If designed correctly, technology only extends the creative powers of the individual. Technology needn’t be “high-tech” to be effective, either. Chalk on a graphite board is one of the earliest forms of technology in the classroom; a printed book is a kind of machine; a magnifying glass is technology for investigation of the natural world; string is a tool for building things.

A Pedagogy of Answers

Too many schools apply a paint-by-numbers approach to tech: “Let’s cover this fixed information, in this exact way, in this set amount of time, and judge ourselves as educators and students based on standardized test results.” Even our national conversation about the education crisis in the STEM subjects(science, technology, engineering, and math) focuses almost solely on America’s competitiveness on the world stage and students’ qualifications for the job market of tomorrow. That stagnant conversation has leeched much of the joy, magic, and love of learning from the study of those subjects and replaced it with an R.O.I. model of education.

Take Los Angeles’s plan to put iPads into the hands of each of its 650,000 students, which was a complete disaster; the nation’s second largest school district demanded a refund from Apple and Pearson, the company that designed the $1.3 billion curriculum. The mistake made in L.A. is that the city’s iPad experiment focused on answers: information, knowledge, skills, and tests. Children don’t learn that way.

To date, tech in the classroom has been used mostly to prettify an outdated model of passive learning. Examples of this kind of misapplication might be, “Let’s take the latest laptop computer and put a flashcard app on it!” Or, “Let’s make a math game where kids shoot at the right answer like they’re space aliens!” That kind of tech in the classroom hasn’t worked because it simply propagates into new mediums a broken model of how people learn.

A Pedagogy of Questions

Our national teaching model has for too long been a pedagogy of answers. In its place I’d like to suggest a new pedagogy of questions—one that prizes interest-driven, project-based, exploratory studies. Personal gardens of learning with no single pathway through them. More open play and less rote memorization. More learning by discovery than following set instructions. (It’s for these reasons I’d always choose a bucket of random Legos over a manual to build a colored-brick Batmobile or Death Star. . . ) And technology has an important part to play in making that vision a reality. Let’s imagine for a moment a classroom where children are encouraged to:

1. Go about and wander until a salient question arises.

2. Paint and model and code solutions or experiments or musings to dig deeper into the questions raised.

3. Build things and try them out, politically, socially, or physically.

4. Share and modify results.

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Robots, DIY Computers, And Other Gifts For Your Little STEM Genius

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Fatherly – Steve Schiff

These days, if you’re failing to raise your kid on a solid foundation of programming, engineering, science, and math skills you immediately forgot after eighth grade graduation, you may as well be raising the Wolfpack. STEM education is all the rage and it’s not going anywhere as long as the future is chock full of high-tech jobs that don’t exist yet. Give your kid one of these 10 programming, engineering, and construction toys and they could end up building the next Santa tracker. Which is currently running on a severely outdated platform.

Wonder Workshop Dash And Dot

Dash and Dot are a pair of adorable, programmable robots that can build, make music, or just drive around looking festive in reindeer antlers and Santa hats, because they’re LEGO-compatible. Coding the bots to do their bidding helps kids understand that computers are actually machines that people build to do what they want, not just sentient hunks of metal that wreak havoc out of the box. Not yet, anyway.
Wonder Workshop Dash & Dot Robot Wonder Pack ($280)

Makey Makey

Makey Makey Classic and Makey Makey GO are a mini circuit board and USB stick that turn anything into a touchpad, with endlessly awesome possibilities. Banana keyboard? Check. Jell-O joystick? Done. SmartPie Selfie camera that automatically snaps a photo when your kid takes a cream pie to the face?? Hell yes. For 25 bucks, you give your kid the ability to create all that other crap on their list. It’s a Christmas miracle!
Makey Makey Classic ($50)
Makey Makey GO ($25)

GoldieBlox All Gold Everything

Literally every GoldieBlox thing. If you still don’t know about GoldieBlox: 1) What the hell were you doing during the Super Bowl and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade? 2) Seriously? Here’s the skinny: they blew past their $150,000 Kickstarter goal in 4 days, and less than 3 years later are “disrupting the pink aisle” in Toys ‘R’ Us stores nationwide, slinging engineering toys to good little future-building girls of all ages. So yeah, that little girl on your list wants all of them.
GoldieBlox All Gold Everything ($280)

Bitsbox

Bitsbox delivers a new set of coding projects every month that allow kids age 6-12 to build real apps for real devices (in real life, despite being originally launched on the Island Of Made Up Toys that is Kickstarter). The ongoing subscription ensures their interest in coding won’t wane over time. Kind of like your Fitbit keeping you focused on that New Year’s weight loss resolution. How many steps did you take today?
Bitsbox ($20 monthly PDF, $40 month to month, $35 for 3 months, $30 for 12 months)

Makedo Cardboard Construction

Whatever you give your kid, they’d rather play with the box. So after you clean up the tinsel and wrapping paper explosion and they’ve tired of what’s inside the packages, create something truly epic with Makedo’s starter kit. The safety saw and fastener screws will ensure that all your parts are customized and securely fastened. Because a homemade Santa sleigh is great, but Scotch tape just doesn’t hold at those altitudes.
Makedo Cardboard Construction Starter Toolkit ($13)

Code Monkey Island

This board game cleverly uses cards to teach kids programming skills like strategic problem solving, adaptability, looping, assignment operations, and Boolean operators. The cards dictate how each player’s team of monkeys moves towards their goal of reaching the banana patch, and your kids don’t even realize they’re learning because LOOKIT THE MONKEYS!
Code Monkey Island ($35)

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Using LEGO to Teach Hands-On Math

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We Are Teachers – Erin Bittman

Make exploring math concepts—including multiplication and place value—fun for students using Lego bricks. Here are some ideas.

Lego Fractions
Give students 10 Legos of various colors. Students stack their Legos, then they figure out the fraction for each color. This can also be turned into a math game (image below). Students roll a die and create Lego fraction towers, then they figure out the fraction.

Lego Area and Perimeter
Students can create big areas by putting Legos side by side, or find the area of single bricks. They simply count the studs on top of the bricks. Students can also find the area and perimeter using grid paper. Tell students not to stress if bricks don’t fit perfectly on the grid paper. They can round up. Have them color the area of each of their Legos on their grid paper.

Lego Tech Integration (Area and Perimeter)
Build with Chrome: Students find and explore different plots. They can re-create a famous landmark or just play around. Once they are finished building, they can print their creations and find the area and perimeter of their structure. 3-D or 2-D versions of the art can be printed out.

 

Lego Multiplication: “Groups of” and Arrays
Groups of: Make multiplication fun with Legos! A Lego brick represents one group. Kids count the studs to figure out the multiplication equation. For example, 2 lego bricks with 4 studs (2 groups of 4) is 2 x 4. Then, they solve it. (2 x 4 = 8).
Array: When you look at the studs on top of a Lego, you see an array. Kids examine the rows to figure out the equation. For example, one Lego brick with 8 studs (2 horizontal rows of 4 studs, 2 x 4 = 8).

Lego Mean, Median, Mode and Range
Hand each student a baggie of various Legos and explore mean, median, mode and range!

Array Studs
1. Have students classify bricks by number of studs.
2. Then, have them figure out the total number of studs for each group.
3. Once they have their numbers, they figure out the m, m, m, r.
Number of Bricks With Same Number of Studs
1. Students classify bricks by number of studs.
2. Then, they count how many they have in each group.
3. Then, they figure out the m, m, m, r.

Lego Colors
You could also build Lego Towers and classify bricks by color. Then, have students figure out the mean, median, mode and range. Set a timer and have kids build the tallest tower they can before the time runs out! They take their tower apart and classify their bricks by color. Using their data (ex: 19 red, 10 blue, etc.), they figure out the m, m, m, r for their Lego colors.

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The Shift To Digital Learning and It’s Benefits

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Education Week – Tom Vander Ark

The shift from print to digital is a profound transition in how human beings learn, it is more significant than the development of the printing press and its benefits are spreading much more quickly. Like the printing press six centuries ago, this transition is transforming formal education and spreading informal learning opportunities.

Digital learning is powering seven benefits that are changing the opportunity set for teachers. There are three additional benefits that are proving to be game changers for educators.

1. Personalized learning. The opportunity to help every student learn at the best pace and path for them is the most important benefit of digital learning. Hundreds of next generation schools are prototyping the benefits of customization.

A diverse group of 28 practitioners, advocates, and business and union leaders recently came together to reimagine education given the new opportunity of digital learning. They noted that personalized, relevant and contextualized learning can increasingly be tailored based on the learner’s own passions, strengths, needs, family, culture, and community.

One on one tutoring is a good example of personalized learning, but it is expensive. The shift to digital learning can approximate the benefits of tutoring while freeing up time for teachers to address individual and small group needs.

The opportunity to customize learning sequences for each student will make education more productive. Special needs will be more quickly diagnosed, learning gaps will be addressed, and progress will be accelerated.

2. Expanded learning opportunities. Digital learning is extending learning opportunities worldwide. Education Reimagined celebrates open-walled learning and acknowledges that, “learning happens at many times and in many places and intentionally leverages its expansive nature in the learner’s development of competencies. learners with authentic, rich, and diverse learning opportunities.”

Access to full and part-time online learning means that every student, state policy permitting, has access to many world languages, college preparatory curriculum, and advanced studies. It is remarkable that thousands of university courses by the best professors are available for free to anyone with a broadband connection.

3. High engagement learning. The shift to digital can boost student motivation. Anyone who has witnessed the engagement of game-based learning can appreciate the potential to create learning experiences that boost persistence.

Kristen DiCerbo , the lead at Pearson’s Center for Learning Science & Technology, is similarly passionate about the many possibilities that games offer education – better engagement, invisible assessment, deep learning,

High agency learning recognizes learners as active participants in their own learning and engages them in the design of their experiences and the realization of their learning outcomes in ways appropriate for their developmental level. Evidence that encouraging student agency will produce better learning outcomes is central to Most Likely to Succeed: A Film About What School Could Be.

In Getting Smart (2011), I argued that customization would lead to productivity (more learning per hour) and improved motivation would lead to more learning time each day and across each year. Next generation schools appear to be bearing out these predictions.

4. Competency-based learning. Students show what they know and progress based on demonstrated mastery. Competency-based learning is possible in paper and pencil (I saw it inChugach Alaska in 1999) but it is hard to monitor and manage an individual progress model at scale.

Flex blends support individual progress. Dynamic grouping, workshops, and project-based learning can add lots of collaborative learning to an individual progress model.

Because competency-based learning changes everything about school, the transition from age cohorts to individual progress models will take longer, this is a generational shift.

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What Is The Secret To Being Good At Maths?

5 Reasons Screen Time Is Actually GOOD for Your Kids

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LoveToKnow – Talya Stone

In this technology cranked up age, we have all been brainwashed to believe TV and video games are as evil as an enormous pimple on your wedding day. If we are to believe common thought, the onslaught of electronics will rot your children’s brains, make them socially backward and leave them glued to the couch forever more – annihilating society as know it. Hold up! Are we all just a bunch of boneheads for thinking this? We think perhaps it’s time to say goodbye to the fear-mongers as we share five ways screen time is actually GOOD for your kids.

1. It’s All About the Co-viewing

OK so dumping your kids in front of the boob tube as a babysitter for hours on end is clearly as smart as a bulldog chewing on a wasp, but according to a report by The Joan Hanz Cooney Center, co-viewing in terms of both the TV platform, and other digital platforms has social, emotional and educational benefits; helping to increase learning and discussion, reduce fear and aggression, not to mention being a good excuse for some precious snuggle time.

So rather than you mindlessly staring at the screen like you’re ten shy of a dozen (hey, we know you’re not really), ask them about what they are seeing on the screen, where else they have seen it, the behavior of the characters they are watching, etc. In other words, TALK ABOUT IT. The key here is television as an active, (rather than a rotting sack of potatoes), experience.

And if you don’t have time to co-view with them? Ask them about the show afterward, what the characters did, how they felt, which was their favorite part and so on. It ain’t rocket science after all.

2. OMG! Video Games Make Your Kids Better Adjusted??!

SOURCE

This statement may sound as nutty as a fruitcake, but Holy Guacamole it is so! Playing video games reportedly does make your kids better adjusted. What??! We all thought playing video games turned them into mindless, dribbling, socially malfunctioning, indoor-dwelling zombie freaks? How can this be true?! A recent study Oxford University found that kids that played up to an hour of video games a day between the ages of 10 – 15 were happier, more sociable and less hyperactive. Well, slap us silly.

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Tools to Turn Your Kid into a Math and Science Pro

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Common Sense Media

These terrific digital tools can make math and science come alive for even the most reluctant student. In addition to facts, figures, and formulas, these math and science apps, games, and sites help kids learn how to learn. You can help by encouraging kids to try and try again when faced with challenging concepts. Perseverance and resilience are character-building traits that kids can apply to any learning situation. Get more advice and media recommendations for helping kids learn at home.

Browse Tools to Turn Your Kid into a Math and Science Pro

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Edtech’s Next Big Disruption Is The College Degree

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TechCrunch –  Aaron Skonnard

For centuries, the college degree has been the global gold standard for assessing an individual entering the workforce. But after cornering the credentials market for nearly a millennium, the degree’s days alone at the top are most definitely numbered. By 2020, the traditional degree will have made room on its pedestal for a new array of modern credentials that are currently gaining mainstream traction as viable measures of learning, ability and accomplishment. Technology is changing the job market, and it’s only natural that we find new ways of determining who’s the right fit for those jobs.

I’ll explain shortly why I think 2020 is the magic timeframe for the new credentialing movement to reach its tipping point, but first some brief history. The traditional college degree traces back to the 12th or 13th century, when the European university model developed a set of credentials that spread across the world and still remain more or less true to their original intent and structure. Even the titles of modern degrees — bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate — derive from medieval Europe’s educational paradigm.

In one respect, the staying power of the traditional degree is a testament to its timeless relevance, cultural meaning and professional utility. The world has experienced wrenching technological and cultural change over the centuries, and yet the academic degree remains the de facto baseline for fields ranging from accounting to computer science to biology — and everything in-between. I myself, a developer by trade, hold a bachelor’s degree and taught at a university before founding Pluralsight. The degree will always be relevant, but not exclusively so — even our sacred cows aren’t safe from theforces of disruption.

So, back to our timeline: 2020. For the first time in centuries, powerful forces are converging to challenge the assumption that a college degree is the only way. Frustration with the rising cost of higher education — and the underlying reasons — is at a fever pitch. Students, who are the primary customer for the trillion-dollar global education market, expect their education to improve their career prospects (86 percent of college freshmen attend college to get a better job) and are becoming disillusioned when this doesn’t always occur. At the same time, employers expect a more sophisticated worker at all levels, and a more transparent view into what qualifies a candidate for employment — both at the point of hire and over time, as skill requirements evolve.

This has led to aggressive efforts to innovate in recent years, both within and without the education community. Notably, this confluence of conditions spawned the global massive open online course (MOOC) craze, which peaked in 2012 (the “year of the MOOC”) and 2013.

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How Will You Be Remembered by Your Children and Grandchildren?

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Huffington Post – Robert Mauterstock

The last six months of my father’s life, I visited him every week in his rehab facility. He was desperately trying to get well enough to return home. Because of his Parkinson’s disease he could no longer swallow and as a result couldn’t eat normally. But he could talk. And we would talk for hours every time I visited him.

But most of our conversations were about insignificant things like sports teams, my job or the weather. We very rarely got into a real conversation. On one occasion I asked him what it was like growing up as the son of a minister. He told me that he had never gone to a department store to buy clothes. All his new clothes came from the barrel, where members of the congregation would toss clothes they didn’t want.

He shared that in the first eighteen years of his life, he had moved eleven times as my grandfather was transferred from church to church. But we never talked about his childhood again. And I never asked him about his experience as an Army engineer, landing at Omaha Beach on D Day.

Six months after my father passed away, my mother asked me a question. “Did you ever look at Dad’s scrapbook?” And she handed me a leather bound scrapbook filled with pictures, maps, newspaper stories, insignia and a letter signed by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. I was shocked. I had never known that this scrapbook existed.

For the last fifteen years I have leafed through that scrapbook hundreds of times, wishing that I had the opportunity to learn from him what his experience was like. But I will never get the chance. I share this with you because I want to emphasize the importance of sharing your stories and experiences with your children.

How did you and your spouse meet? What was it like growing up? What were your parents like? Where did you go to school? What was it like? Our children want to hear about these things. And we need to share them.

There are several ways to share your experiences and your life with your family. You can create an audio or video recording for them. You can write your personal biography. There is a national organization that can help you with this project. It is the Association of Personal Historians (http://ift.tt/1CRJ2Jm). Through them you can find a professional in your area to help you. They will create a professional audio, video recording or book of your life with your input.

In addition, Storycorps ( storycorps.org) has created a smartphone app. which provides you with a series of questions to create an interview. A family member can ask you the questions and the answers will be recorded on your smart phone. If you desire this recording can be saved to a national archive at the Library of Congress. Storycorps started interviewing individuals in 2003. It was created to provide all Americans with the opportunity to record, share and preserve the stories of their lives. Over 40,000 people have conducted recorded interviews at their kiosks around the country. These are now saved to the Library of Congress.

The Legacy Letter

But let’s assume you are not ready to go to those lengths yet to record your life. The best way to start is to write a Legacy Letter. It is as simple as answering a series of questions in a letter format.

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Raising Respectful Children

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Daily Monitor – Pauline Bangirana

Today, children lack respect towards peers, elders and people’s property. But as a parent, how do you ensure that despite all the challenges, you raise a respectful child. One that not only respects elders but playmates as well. It is a parent’s pride when their child is respectful because they will be appreciated for it. However, in some instances, respect means that a child might “hate you” instead of like you. Let’s face it, most of the things that require respect are hated by most children and as such, a child will dislike you because you are always telling them something they do not want to do.

“Give children specific instructions so that they know what you want them to do,” Enid Bukenya, an advocate, says.

Involve Others

But what happens when you leave instructions and they do not follow them? Bukenya recommends that when you tell a child to do something and they defy, as a parent, you can seek help from others. “You can agree to communal raising of the child and take them to different relatives so that they can learn good habits and be taught how things can be done.”
Respect on one hand is earned and to teach a child, they learn through observation. If you are to teach them respect, let it start from you. How are you treating the adults around you? For instance, your husband or even parents, how do you relate with them? If you are disrespectful to a fellow adult, a child will follow suit because they learn how to honour their parents by observing how their parents honour others.

Teach Through Instruction
Bukenya recommends that parents can adapt to teaching their children the importance of being respectful through bible scriptures.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Minecraft and The Hour of Code

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VentureBeat – Paul Sawers

Microsoft has announced a partnership with Code.org that will bring Minecraft into the education curriculum.

Mojang, the Sweden-based game development studio that shot to prominence due to its work on Minecraft, was acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion last year.

Founded in 2013, Code.org is a non-profit organization that seeks to encourage computer science uptake in schools, while also offering coding lessons through its own website. Now, Code.org is offering a Minecraft coding tutorial to mark its third annual Hour of Code campaign, which will run from December 7 -13, during Computer Science Education Week.

Aimed at learners aged six years and over, the tutorial introduces budding programmers to the basics of coding within the Minecraft platform. Gamers are then given a set of 14 challenges to dig into the coding concepts they learned during the tutorial.

“A core part of our mission to empower every person on the planet is equipping youth with computational thinking and problem-solving skills to succeed in an increasingly digital world,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO. “With ‘Minecraft’ and Code.org, we aim to spark creativity in the next generation of innovators in a way that is natural, collaborative and fun.”

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The Key To Happiness: Set Goals, Achieve Them and Reflect on Them

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Quartz – Jenny Anderson

Kris Duggan, CEO and co-founder of BetterWorks, created software to help companies set goals and track their progress towards meeting them. John Doerr, a billionaire venture capitalist who was an early backer of Google, invested $15 million in the company. BetterWorks’ clients include Disney, Schneider Electric, Kroger, and Aidan and Colin.

Those last two are Duggan’s kids.

Every six months, Duggan, his wife, and their two sons (aged 11 and 13) travel somewhere—recently, it was Hawaii—and spend half a day discussing personal goals. At the “off-site,” as they call it, goals are rated, discussed, and reflected upon. New stretch-goals are set. The family measures and manages all this information the same way that Disney, Schneider Electric, or Kroger does—with BetterWorks software.

For example, Aidan, 11, recently set the following five goals:

• Master the trumpet (learn three new songs)
• Take art class (choose an inspiring art class; complete it; complete a piece of art)
• Read six books by summer
• Add two new songs on SoundCloud
• Learn 10 new magic tricks and perform them

Unsurprisingly, Duggan (the dad) is a quantified-self evangelist. “I read a long time ago that the key to happiness in life is to set stretch goals—aggressive but attainable—and then to achieve those, and then to reflect on your success and then to set the next period of goals,” he told Quartz. “Anybody who achieved ultra-success has used that philosophy.”

Performance management is in flux: big companies like Accenture,Deloitte, and GE have recently ditched the traditional annual performance review as a management tool. When Duggan was CEO of software firm Badgeville, he searched for performance-tracking software that would allow employees to identify three-to-five important things they were working on, which would then be continuously tracked and shared with others at the company. It sounds simple, but he couldn’t find anything suitable, so he built his own software, incorporating the latest thinking on productivity and measurement.

For example, individuals are 42% more likely to achieve their goals by writing them down, and there’s a 78% increase in achievement when sharing weekly progress with a friend, according to research by the Dominican University of California. FitBit users take 43% more steps than non Fitbit users, according to Fitbit, and companies that have their employees revise or review their goals on a monthly basis are 50% more likely to score in the top quartile of business performance, according to Deloitte.

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