What Are You Without Your iPhone? A Touch Brain-Dead.

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What Are You Without Your iPhone? A Touch Brain-Dead.

It didn’t come with an umbilical cord. It just came with a charger.

But your smartphone is now more than just your baby. It’s your lifeline to your very self.

How bad is it, though, when you are parted from your phone? Do you pine? Do you whine? Does your mind shut down in plaintive grief?

Researchers at the University of Missouri thought they’d test this out. Their conclusions might, to some, seem positively mind-numbing.

Just the headline from the university’s own newsroom makes my timbers shiver: “iPhone Separation Linked to Physiological Anxiety, Poor Cognitive Performance, MU Study Finds.”

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Instagram Is the Fastest Growing Major Social Network

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Instagram Is the Fastest Growing Major Social Network

Instagram is growing quickly — faster than the competition, it turns out.

New data from the Pew Research Internet Project released Friday found that Instagram was the fastest growing major social network among U.S. adults last year. The segment of U.S. adults using the photo-sharing app grew nine percent over 2013, meaning 26 percent of the U.S. adult population is now on Instagram.

That marks the biggest jump of any major social network studied, surpassing growth by Pinterest (seven percent), LinkedIn (six percent) and Twitter (five percent). Facebook, on the other hand, didn’t expand its user base among U.S. adults at all last year, staying steady at 71 percent, according to the study.

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How Girls Are Seeking (and Subverting) Approval Online

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How Girls Are Seeking (and Subverting) Approval Online

It’s not a law that you have to post a selfie before, during, and after every activity. But for kids, it’s pretty much mandatory. The resulting likes, thumbs-ups, and other ratings all get tallied, both in the stark arithmetic of the Internet and in kids’ own minds. For some — especially girls — what starts as a fun way to document and share experiences can turn into an obsession about approval that can wreak havoc on self-image.

That kids have been comparing themselves to popular images in traditional media — and coming up short — is a well-researched phenomenon. But new studies are just beginning to determine the effects of social media — which is arguably more immediate and intimate — on the way kids view themselves. A Common Sense survey called Children, Teens, Media, and Body Image found that many teens who are active online fret about how they’re perceived, and that girls are particularly vulnerable.

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MindMake | Parental Control

Monitor and Control what is on your child's iPad, iPhone & iTouch

MindMake provides parents with tools to monitor and quantify their child's online activities and content consumption. Our mission is to empower parents to create a safe online environment for their family, and facilitate enriched development with personalized content recommendations.

http://lifecolor.c-cc.co/MindMake-The-Quantified-Child-faa54.html

10 Awesome YouTube Channels for Boys (With No Violence, Explosions, or Macho Posturing)

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From the looks of most boy-targeted media, you’d think young men are only about violence, explosions, and hiding their feelings. While plenty of websites serve up the same old tired ideas, your boys can find better content – and many do — on YouTube. That’s right, the video-sharing channel known for the outrageous, crazy, and who-knows-what is also a great place to find educational, enriching, and just plain fun videos that turn the stereotype of male entertainment on its ear.

What makes great viewing for boys? Shows with male role models who demonstrate respectful relationships to men and women, game tutorials that emphasize creativity and exploration over violence, and scientific discovery that says it’s OK to not always have the right answer.

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Can Parenting via Facebook Backfire?

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Can Parenting via Facebook Backfire?

(CNN)Just about every day on Facebook, I see posts by parents asking for advice related to their children. Granted, many of my friends are parents, but I imagine you see similar posts when you log on as well.

And pretty much every time I read one, I wonder about the pluses and minuses of a world in which many parents now head to their social networks to make parenting decisions.

Sure, getting advice on how to get a toddler to sleep through the night or how to deal with a fussy eater makes sense and seems relatively harmless. But is there something creepy about picking a baby name based on Internet responses or deciding on a punishment based on the opinions of followers?

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Using Minecraft to Challenge Students and Keep Learning Fun

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Much more than just a video game, Minecraft is being used by thousands of educators to tackle difficult learning concepts in an amazingly fun and collaborative digital environment. Students are exploring, crafting and making in 3D virtual worlds where their creativity and imagination can run wild.

No matter what your discipline, the many different elements of Minecraft can be employed to add fun and meaning to just about any lesson.

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10 YouTube Channels for Girls (Completely Makeup- and Fashion-Free!)

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If your daughter comes home from school, throws down her backpack, and hops on YouTube — she’s just like millions of other kids. Girls are flocking to the video-sharing site to watch, share, and comment on everything from toy reviews to cheerleading tips to music videos. But until YouTube develops its kid-focused site, you never know what she might come across.

Age-inappropriate stuff is only one of the pitfalls. The glut of content about makeup, fashion, hair, and shopping just reinforces the idea that girls only care about — or should care about — physical appearance.

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Check Out My Little Monster – Make it Real

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Who is YOUR little monster?! Dress up your monster any way you like! From textures to colors, eyes, teeth and accessories, choose from thousands of combinations to make your monster unique.

Once your monster is exactly the way you want, choose your pose, 3D print your monster and unleash him into the real world!

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Predictive Data for Digital Health and Beyond

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Predictive Data for Digital Health and Beyond

Wearable tech is big business beyond the Google Glass phenomenon — which possibly isn’t the best intro, as Glass seems to have vanished overnight, or has it?

Or maybe that’s the point.

The wearable tech bubble promises to pop, pivot, and reimagine itself at a rate we’ve yet to see. This technology’s ‘big business’ potential extends well beyond Glass — and even beyond the ugly Apple Watch you’ve already decided to buy (I’ll be buying one too).

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Digital Citizen Lesson Mash-Up: Common Sense and Scratch

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Digital Citizen Lesson Mash-Up: Common Sense and Scratch

Every teacher aims to make learning fun and to help students make meaningful connections. Two topics I cover in my technology literacy classes are digital citizenship and computational thinking through computer programming. As I examined Common Sense Education’s digital citizenship lessons and explored the new Scratch programming curriculum, I came up with a surprising mash-up of the two.

My fifth-grade students could learn about staying safe, responsible, and respectful online with the Common Sense curriculum and then create interactive computer animations in Scratch to demonstrate what they learned. The inherent excitement of creating something on the computer was all the motivation my students needed to become champions for digital citizenship. How did we do it?

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Kids Should Code

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Kids Should Code

On Wednesday lunchtimes at Altona Primary, it’s not just the basketball court or the cricket pitch which is the place for students to be. It’s the library, where kids in grades four, five and six crowd around and enthusiastically learn the basics of how to give instructions to a computer – coding.

The students attend not only because they enjoy designing video games, and building robots and their own computers, but because they know how important these skills are for their future. As a nine-year-old explained to one of us, he was learning coding not because he wanted to be a computer scientist, but because he wanted to be an architect.

This kid is lucky. He’s at a school with a passionate IT teacher and a school community that understands how important these skills are. Unfortunately, the failure of the majority of Australian policy makers to recognise what the geeks call “computational thinking” as a fundamental literacy in the 21st century is letting down the bulk of our other students.

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What is The Internet of Me?

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What is The Internet of Me?

The Internet you experience is as unique to you as your fingerprint.

Websites that have worked themselves into our routines and vocabularies have begun to figure out what kind of people we are. By developing algorithms that track our online habits, tech companies have created online experiences that are deeply personal and self-determined.

At its advent, the Internet was seen as the Great Equalizer – globally, all users ostensibly had access to the same content. The amount of content available, however, is vast, and websites like Facebook, Netflix, and Google are overwhelmed by it. Tech companies have found that tracking user habits enables the creation an online universe where you only (mostly) see what you’d like to see, essentially determining the Internet that users are exposed to.

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Questions Before Answers: What Drives a Great Lesson?

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Questions Before Answers: What Drives a Great Lesson?

Recently, I was looking through my bookshelves and discovered an entire shelf of instruction books that came with software I had previously purchased. Yes, there was a time when software was bought in stores, not downloaded. Upon closer examination of these instruction books, I noticed that many of them were for computers and software that I no longer use or even own. More importantly, most were still in shrink-wrap, never opened. I recalled that when I bought software, I just put the disk into the computer and never looked at the book.

I realized that I did the same when I bought a new car — with one exception. I never read the instruction book in the glove compartment. I just turned on the engine and drove off. I already knew how to drive, so I didn’t need a book. The exception occurred when I tried to set the clock. I couldn’t figure it out, so I finally opened the glove compartment and checked the book.

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Can Games Advance Education?

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Can Games Advance Education?

Most people involved with games and learning are familiar with the work of James Paul Gee. A researcher in the field of theoretical linguistics, he argues for the consideration of multiple kinds of literacy. The notion of “New Literacies” expands the conception of literacy beyond books and reading to include visual symbols and other types of representation made possible through, among other things, current digital technologies.

At this point in the evolution of education, it’s critical that we expand our conception of literacy to include more than just words. In fact, we may need to reimagine how we nurture early literacy to make sure we provide a foundation not only for reading, but also for “New Literacies.”

Gee is included in this series because outside of academic psycholinguistics circles, he’s especially well known for his work on video games. He’s written and edited many books on game-based learning and education. He’s influenced countless game designers and educators. Some of his theories have provided the foundation for many of the ideas I’ve covered in this series, especially those having to do with systems thinking.

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Yes, Your Toddler Can Watch TV: The New Rules for Screen Time

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Researchers say it’s OK to break with hardliners—provided you’re interacting right along with your kids. A look at new guidelines that defy pediatricians’ recommendations.

When my oldest child was a toddler, I treated illuminated screens like plutonium. During my training as a pediatrician, I had received the message loud and clear that the recommended amount of television for children under 2 was nil. It was not only the advice that I gave parents about their kids, it was the standard I held for my own. “Screen time” of any sort was strictly verboten.

A few years later, my oldest son can efficiently navigate Netflix to his favored shows from Bob’s Burgers and gets annoyed when I try to do it for him. And that’s to say nothing of his facility with an iPad, a technology that’s been around for less time than he has and has already become ubiquitous.

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Learning To Code Develops Creativity in Kids

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Learning To Code Develops Creativity in Kids

Casey stares at his computer screen, carefully calculating his next move. As part of a school science project to create a simulation of the Earth’s tides, he has spent the better part of the hour trying to animate a moon orbiting the earth, a series of commands that is proving more complex than he had anticipated. But with every iteration and tweak, the determined sixth grader finds himself inching closer to his vision. Finally, he inputs -10 degrees on the X coordinate, 21 on the Y, and hits enter. He grins in giddy satisfaction as he watches his moon makes a perfect circle around the earth.

Casey’s story is one of many that illustrates how the process of learning to code is encouraging something that many believe to be the most important skill we can teach our kids: creativity. We’re all born with it. As kids, we embrace imaginative play, we ask questions, paint colorful pictures, and build elaborate things with our blocks, but somewhere along the way our capacity for creative thinking diminishes. It’s not because we lack the “creative gene”, we just haven’t reinforced it or, as researcher George Land concludes from his longitudinal study on creativity and divergent thinking, we have unlearned it.

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How Integrating Arts Into Other Subjects Makes Learning Come Alive

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How Integrating Arts Into Other Subjects Makes Learning Come Alive

Art has long been recognized as an important part of a well-rounded education — but when it comes down to setting budget priorities, the arts rarely rise to the top. Many public schools saw their visual, performing and musical arts programs cut completely during the last recession, despite the many studies showing that exposure to the arts can help with academics too.

A few schools are taking the research to heart, weaving the arts into everything they do and finding that the approach not only boosts academic achievement but also promotes creativity, self-confidence and school pride.

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Drawp Helps Kids Create and Share Drawings

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An iPad app to create and share beautiful drawings with the people you love.

Ana Albir, CEO/Co-Founder, looks forward to applying her well-rounded background in engineering and business to the challenging problem of encouraging creative expression in children. Prior to co-founding Moondrop, Ana worked for years in the consulting industry, designing and developing custom software to help social venture and financial firms realize their potential through the use of technology.

As a pediatric occupational therapist, I’m calling on parents, teachers and governments to ban the use of all handheld devices for children under the age of 12 years.

She is excited to do the same in the fast growing field of mobile applications for youngsters.

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10 Reasons Handheld Devices Should Be Banned for Kids Under 12

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10 Reasons Handheld Devices Should Be Banned for Kids Under 12

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Canadian Society of Pediatrics state infants aged 0-2 years should not have any exposure to technology, 3-5 years be restricted to one hour per day, and 6-18 years restricted to 2 hours per day (AAP 2001/13, CPS 2010).

Children and youth use 4-5 times the recommended amount of technology, with serious and often life threatening consequences (Kaiser Foundation 2010, Active Healthy Kids Canada 2012). Handheld devices (cell phones, tablets, electronic games) have dramatically increased the accessibility and usage of technology, especially by very young children (Common Sense Media, 2013).

Following are 10 research-based reasons for this ban. Please visit zonein.ca to view the Zone’in Fact Sheet for referenced research.

1. Rapid brain growth


2. Delayed Development


3. Epidemic Obesity


4. Sleep Deprivation


5. Mental Illness


6. Aggression


7. Digital dementia


8. Addictions


9. Radiation emission


10. Unsustainable

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