Google, Twitter and Others Face Growing Pressure For Online Safety

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San Jose Mercury News – Queenie Wong

Polly Naber thought her 15-year-old daughter Jill was just grappling with the daily stress of school work and cheerleading, but days after the Los Gatos High School freshman took her own life in 2009, the mom came across a shocking discovery.

Her daughter had sent a topless photo of herself to a boy, the image was spread to others and then posted online.

“I was pretty blown out of the water, but all a sudden it started to make sense,” she said.

Seven years later, tech firms are under growing pressure from the government, parents and advocacy groups to do more as social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter grow in popularity, mobile phone use skyrockets and the lives of children, teens and adults increasingly become tied to the digital world. Online activity is also becoming more immediate with live video, augmented reality and other innovations creating a tough environment for tech firms dealing with online harassment, terrorism and the dark side of the Internet.

On Tuesday, Silicon Valley tech firms highlighted their efforts around online safety as part of Safer Internet Day, which happens every year and is meant to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones. That same day, President Barack Obama also sent to Congress a $4 trillion budget proposal that includes $19 billion for cybersecurity efforts.

“I think there’s a huge amount of responsibility on the tech industry to get this right and most of the major companies have been at this for a while,” said Stephen Balkam, founder and CEO of the Family Online Safety Institute. “It’s good business. If your customers and users don’t trust you, they’re unlikely to come back and use your products.”

After her daughter’s death, Naber teamed up with Yahoo and the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety to create a digital online safety course, helping to provide law enforcement with the tools and resources needed to educate parents and students at schools about the dangers lurking on the Internet.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

9 Ways ‘Lazy’ Parenting Raises Great Men

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The Good Men Project – Anna Rosenblum Palmer

What happens to our kids when we choose not to adopt a “parenting philosophy”?

Helicopter Parenting. Free Range Parenting. Sharenting. The names go on and on. We all reap rewards and pay the price for whichever philosophy we adopt. What happens when we don’t adopt a philosophy at all? What happens to our kids if we cross the line from laissez-faire to downright lazy? Let’s take a look…

1. Outerwear My son rushed out the door to school juggling his backpack, sneaker, and water bottle. What was missing? His coat. It was 5 degrees. Did I rush after him? No. I sat at the counter sipping my tea. One frozen morning can saved hundreds of mornings of nagging.

2. Laundry My son rarely gets out of his snugly fleece. We rotate through contributions and it was his turn doing the laundry. After dumping a bowl of feral down his front he added his “fuzzy” to a full load. He ran the washer and stopped there. From Friday to Tuesday things melded into a sour mess. He lost his beloved fleece. We were down a few sheets, but we are now up a diligent laundry doer. Things are fresh and folded in just a few hours.

3. Dinner This one is a simple equation. One meal + full family = flexible eaters.

4. Cold Hard Cash My kids get a dollar per year of life. The money comes at the end of family meeting and is not tied to chores. Contributing to our household is an expectation that stands apart from payment. They are paid in cash each Monday. If they leave their cash lying around they lose it. This has happened one time each.

5. Reaping the Rewards of Natural Consequences Do you dread food shopping? Do your kids whine and demand things at checkout, do you forget half of your list? Are you willing to give up a week of organization? Let them shop.

Our town has a small grocery store. I sat in the car and talked with the boys about what our family needed to get through the week. They carefully copied down a list. Which they ignored. I gave them the money to shop and sat literal drivers seat while the boys took the figurative one. About 50 minutes later they were loading the car. By Thursday we were all a bit hungry. The next week they chose more chicken. As a bonus they appreciate the delicate balance of meal planning and budget and are much better companions when we take to the cart collaboratively.

6. The Reverse Tuck In I go to bed. They tuck me in.

So simple. So satisfying. They feel competent and grown up. I feel my eyelids on my eyeballs.

Read More at The Good Men Project

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Tech That Teaches

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Mental Floss – Alyssa Oursler

Your kids may spend more time staring at screens on smartphones, tablets, and computers than books, but that downtime can still be educational. Check out these apps that can teach children of all ages far more than a game of Candy Crush—and might even inspire them to learn and live better.

1. HOPSCOTCH; FREE

Hopscotch

Want your children to get a headstart on coding when all they want to do is play games? Introduce them to Hopscotch. The iOS-compatible app, targeted toward kids ages 9 to 11, teaches users to create games using simple tools and tutorials—whether they want to replicate existing ones like Angry Birds or dream up their own.

Find it: iOS

2. DUOLINGO; FREE

Duolingo

It’s no secret that starting early makes it easier to learn a second language, but things get even easier with a fun app like Duolingo. Kids can choose from a substantial list of languages—including French, Spanish, Russian, Norwegian, and more—and learn through bite-sized lessons that feel more like games. Plus, this app is also great for adults. With a little screen time, family dinners could soon be in a foreign language!

Find it: iOS, Android

3. MONSTER MATH 2; FREE

Monster Math 2

There’s no better way to beef up math skills than by fighting monsters! This app, targeted towards elementary students, comes with a customizable curriculum and even adheres to Common Core standards.

Find it: iOS

4. MAGOOSH; FREE

Magoosh

It’s hard to spice up study sessions for standardized tests like the SATs, but Magoosh does its best. Its apps, like the Vocabulary Builder, offer fun and efficient ways for younger high school students to get a headstart on test prep without feeling overwhelmed or pressured.

Find it: iOS, Android

5. STAR WALK; $3

z

Star Walk

This app is a one-two punch: It will get kids outside and get them to shoot for the stars. Star Walk is an astronomy guide that’s sure to spark curiosity about the solar system by notifying users of upcoming astronomical events, pointing out the position of constellations and planets, and much more.

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Biofeedback Games Feed off Human Inputs

Raise a Child Who Loves Life

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Parents Magazine – Robin Westin

After a family trip in Florida, I’m suddenly stranded with my 3-year-old son at the airport while a blizzard tears through the Northeast. Joined by hundreds of frustrated families, I’m pretty sure we’re all feeling caged and miserable. Well, almost all of us. Gabe seems to be having the time of his life. There’s so much to do: enlisting new buddies in a game of hide-under-the-seats, “reading” the same picture books (for the gazillionth time), eating the junk food I so rarely allow him, and the ultimate thrill — sleeping on the floor. Wow. Fifteen hours later, we’re finally boarding the plane when Gabe grabs my hand and asks, “Mom, what day is this?” “Wednesday,” I sigh wearily. “Well, let’s do this again next Wednesday!”

Sure, it’s great to have a kid with an upbeat attitude — but believe me, I’m not giving myself a Mother-of-the-Year award. I tend to think he was born on the sunny side; there’s even research to suggest it. Scientists are zeroing in on the possibility that a single gene could be responsible for making some people naturally positive and others pessimistic. It probably involves the production of serotonin, the brain chemical that’s known to influence moods. Nevertheless, scientists estimate that only 50 percent of an upbeat attitude is genetic. “Happiness is really a wide range of positive emotions that are more learned behavior than inborn traits,” says Christine Carter, Ph.D., executive director of the Greater Good Science Center, in Berkeley, California. “Our children develop their habits of thinking, feeling, and behaving based on what we teach them about the world, their relationships, and our expectations.”

That’s why it doesn’t make much difference whether your child was born a Winnie the Pooh or an Eeyore. Boosting optimism, or turning a natural grump into a giggler, isn’t the goal. “It’s deep-down, everlasting happiness we’re after,” says Aaron Cooper, Ph.D., coauthor of I Just Want My Kids to Be Happy!

Who wouldn’t want their children to have a firm foundation of contentment so they can learn to roll with the punches, enjoy what they have, and make the best of any situation? Inspired to find the roots of happiness, I spoke to experts as well as parents who say their children are truly content. I discovered that there are five keys to helping your kids stay in the bliss zone.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

The 12 Apps That Every Parent Of A Teen Should Know About

Micro Learning for The Modern Learner

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eLearning Industry – Alfredo Leone

There has been a lot of buzz in the learning industry about micro learning and about shorter learning experiences having a better impact with learners. Several companies are implementing learning production and distribution models based on targeted content nuggets or pills that let learners control their learning time and ensure that learning occurs at the time of need.

Steps To Address Micro Learning Moments

In a recent post on Think with Google, Google focused on the opportunity for brands to connect with consumers by focusing on the hundreds of real-time, intent-driven micro moments that make today’s mobile driven customer journey. I believe the same concepts apply to the eLearning industry, as companies and organizations develop new learning strategies that engage learners along a new real-time and intent-driven learning journey made of micro learning moments.

While the hype around micro learning is very much deserved, all the discussion focuses mainly on how to replicate technologies and formats of generic content platforms like Facebook and YouTube that arguably deal with micro content well. Vendors are rushing to provide enhanced features to create, edit, enhance, and package such micro content, primarily video. What is missing is the proper contextualization of the learning experience that makes micro learning applicable and effective. For example, it is not enough to deliver to learners short videos as alternative to traditional online learning courses just for the sake of addressing shorter attention spans.

Taking a step back, the surveys powered by Google in their work on micro moments highlighted consumer behaviors that apply to learners as well in our understanding of how to develop learning strategies and platforms that effectively address micro learning moments. Some of them:

• 62% of smartphone users are more inclined to take immediate action to solve an unexpected problem or a new task.
• 90% have used their smartphone to move towards achieving a long-term goal or multi-step process through small steps (i.e., people pursue big goals in small moments).
• 91% said they are looking for new ideas on mobile devices while performing routine tasks.
• 91% of smartphone users seek ideas through these devices at the same time they perform other tasks.
• This year users have seen on YouTube 100m+ hours of “how-to-do” content.

Google has categorized these new mobile-driven behaviors into 4 micro moments that consumers face on a daily basis along the customer journey: Want-to-know, want-to-do, want-to-go, and want-to-buy (4 New Moments Every Marketer Should Know). Learners today exhibit the same behaviors that need to be addressed when implementing effective micro learning solutions.

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Teens Start Movement To Teach Kids To Code

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Business Insider – Julie Bort

While other high school kids spend their weekends playing sports, video games and hanging with friends, two Silicon Valley teenagers spend their free time teaching other kids to code.

Vineet Kosaraju, a 17-year-old high school senior from Saratoga, and Nikhil Cheerla, a 16-year-old high school junior from Cupertino, have started something of a movement with their organization MathAndCoding.org.

MathAndCoding is an organization dedicated to hands-on coding classes for kids, grade school through high school, exclusively taught by other kid coders, often the kids that learned to code themselves through the program.

Since they did their first class of about 20 grade-school kids at the Mountain View, California library a year and a half ago, they have now taught 1,100 kids how to code in the Bay Area via over 200 classes taught at 18 libraries. And their students have created more than 1,600 projects, they tell Business Insider.

MathandCoding.orgThese kids are taking a MathandCoding class taught by other kids.

Going nationwide

And now, the movement is starting to go nationwide, where Kosaraju and Cheerla are teaching kids in places like Texas and North Carolina how to teach these kid coding classes, with the curriculum these two kids have created and posted to their MathAndCoding website.

“We have 31 volunteers teachers now,” Cheerla says, and about half of them are graduates from MathAndCoding classes, who then went on and studied and did more projects on their own.

It all started as more-or-less a friendly argument/challenge between the two boys, who have known each other since they were little.

Both of them learned to code in middle school, taught by their parents. All four of their parents work in the tech industry as hardware engineers. (Kosaraju’s dad and Cheerla’s mom used to work for the same big tech company. That’s how they became family friends).

MathandCoding.orgThese kids are learning to become teachers to teach other kids how to code.

They were discussing that these days “people learn programming without the support of other people. They learn a bunch of stuff online at sites like Kahn Academy and Codeacademy,” Kosaraju tells us.

Cheerla believed that online learning was just as good as the taught-by-a-parent method. Kosaraju was less sure. So they spent an evening doing a bunch of coding classes atCode.org and concluded they were both right … and both wrong.

It was pretty easy to learn coding online, especially if you already had some skills. But there was also something to be said for having a support group, people to talk to about your project in person, ask questions and just help you get started.

So, they decided to do something about it. They called various nearby libraries to see who would let them teach a class to kids. Only one said yes, in the city of Mountain View.

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A Delightful Way To Teach Kids About Computers

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TED Talks – Linda Liukas

Computer code is the next universal language, and its syntax will be limited only by the imaginations of the next generation of programmers. Linda Liukas is helping to educate problem-solving kids, encouraging them to see computers not as mechanical, boring and complicated but as colorful, expressive machines meant to be tinkered with. In this talk, she invites us to imagine a world where the Ada Lovelaces of tomorrow grow up to be optimistic and brave about technology and use it to create a new world that is wonderful, whimsical and a tiny bit weird.

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Could Computers Ever Replace Teachers?

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The Guardian – Sarah Marsh

In the early 1960s work was underway in a US laboratory on a project that had the potential to revolutionise education. Professor Donald Bitzer, an electrical engineer at the University of Illinois, was creating one of the world’s first teaching machines. By 1972 his software had gone from serving a single classroom to being used across America.

But with its growth came speculation and apprehension – could a computer replace a teacher?

“Computers at this time were viewed as gigantic brains that would control our lives,” says historian Brian Dear. Bitzer’s software – known as the Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations (PLATO) – let students answer questions on six-inch black screens using teletype keyboards costing around £5,000 a terminal.

Forty years on, the question of whether computers could render teachers obsolete is still being asked. Fiona Hollands, senior researcher atColumbia University’s Teachers College, says computers are now being used for several distinct reasons in the classroom: they help face-to-face teacher instruction in “blended learning” models; can be used to supplement educators in “hybrid” teaching models; and replace teachers in “virtual” classrooms.

“A few states and districts have created their own virtual schools with Florida Virtual School being the best known,” says Hollands, adding that arecent study claimed not only can students do just as well with this approach, but there may also be cost savings.

In the US, Rocketship schools have cut overheads by introducing more online classes and employing fewer teachers. They have attracted global attention through their “blended learning” approach in which a quarter of a student’s school day is taught by a computer. Teachers without credentials supervise online sessions while qualified teachers focus on critical thinking. Any savings are used to pay existing teachers more.

Speaking on British radio in 2014, the chief executive of Rocketship, Preston Smith, said that computers had let them “re-think” the school day. But Gordon Lafer, a political economist and University of Oregon professor, thinks they offer a “stripped down program of study”.

Hollands argued that Rocketship schools provide a lower quality education to deprived children. He believes it is hard, for example, to work alone online if your English reading skills are weak and if you are easily distracted.

The UK version of Rocketship, Ark Pioneer academy, will open its doors next year. But Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, has been sceptical. Speaking to the Daily Mail last year, she said that if children end up sitting in front of computers for a significant amount of time, with no routine access to a teacher for every lesson, then that would be a “wrong departure”.

Tricia Kelleher, principal of the Stephen Perse Foundation, warns that technology should not spell the end for teachers. Rather, it should be seen as a useful tool in the teacher’s armoury. “If you’re no longer just standing up and delivering instruction you need to think how that changes the way you teach,” she says.

Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, thinks that in the future the role of teachers will be similar to that of a football coach. “Children can now go out into cyberspace and the teacher is the friend at the back telling them where they might need to go,” he says.

In May 2013, Mitra did a Ted talk on the “school in the cloud” where he discussed his hole in the wall experiment. Mitra placed a computer in a kiosk in a Delhi slum and allowed children to use it freely. He found that many of them, lots who had never seen a computer, could teach themselves all on their own.

“Teachers often ask me, am I going to lose my job? I say no because your job will get harder. It will become a different job. It will go from being a master standing at the front of class to a helpful friend at the back.” He adds: “There will have to be a dramatic change to teacher programmes but we are no where near that yet.”

One thing that is going to change, however, is the need for teachers with technological skills. José Picardo, the assistant principal of Surbiton High school, says teachers who can use technology will replace those who cannot. He adds that tools like video now allow children to learn at any point, and teachers need to make the most of this.

But in this complex debate there’s one thing that continues to reassure Plato developer David Woolley: “Will computers replace a teacher? It never came to pass then and I doubt it ever will. Humans are social animals and there is something about the human connection between students and teachers that matters a lot. That is not to say that other means of teaching are not valuable. They are, but there are things that a computer will never be able to do as a good human teacher.”

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Is Kindergarten Too Early to Learn to Tweet?

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Graphite (Common Sense Media) – Sarah Jackson

Most of us would agree that the Twitter-verse is more appropriate for the likes of celebrities and politicians than young children. But some educators are finding unique ways to use the tool starting as early as kindergarten.

Teachers say children need concrete ways of beginning to understand how the digital world works and how they should behave there.

Brain Puerling, a technology advisor to Sesame Street and author of Teaching in the Digital Age: Smart Tools for Age 3 to Grade 3, says children as young as three understand that digital tools can be used for learning and communicating.

Preschoolers today often incorporate digital tools into their imaginary play, an important way for kids of this age to begin to understand their world. My 4-year-old pretends to Skype with her imaginary friend on a plastic cell phone.

And Puerling says 3- and 4-year-olds at his school use apps to check the weather before deciding whether to wear a jacket outside, a behavior they’ve no doubt learned from the adults in their lives.

At his school they’re using a “tweet tree” to teach young kids about notions of privacy and communication in a digital world. Students pin their own paper tweets onto the tree.

“The idea is for them to start thinking about that [concept] — once their tweet goes up, everyone can see it,” Puerling told the New Zealand Herald. “That’s something we need to get children thinking about, and we need to do it in ways that are concrete.”

Kenyatta Forbes said that for her primary school students at John Fiske Elementary School in Chicago even the concept of email is often very abstract.

“We actually had a technology assessment and the kids had to answer the question: If you had to send an email, would you use a bird, a mailbox, or a computer?” she told us, “The kids picked the bird.”

We had to take a step back and think why don’t our kids understand email? We realized they don’t often see a mailbox or a computer anymore, they see their parents using tablets and mobile devices. And, if you think about email, it’s very abstract. They think, “How does this happen?”

Forbes eventually decided to use an email app designed for little kids to help make the idea more concrete.

Jennifer Aaron tweets with her kindergarteners at PS 150 in New York City. “We tweet as a whole class three times a week,”she told the New York Times School Book. “They come to the rug — Twitter is usually on — and they have either at their seats thought of an idea that they want to share, or when they get to the rug I’ll give them a few seconds to think about what they want to share. And they put their thumb up and I call on them.”

Aaron said her students compose tweets as class. She types the kids’ suggestions as they go, helping them form complete thoughts and learn how to edit down their tweets to fit Twitter’s character count. The classroom’s Twitter account is kept private.

“And then they all start shouting “Tweet!” and I click the button,” she said.

Aaron uses Twitter to communicate with parents about what’s going on in class and as a literacy exercise to help kids learn to express themselves.

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Kids Philosophy & Changing The Way Students Think

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Business Insider – Chris Weller

America may be great at many things, but education isn’t one of them.

It’s here that standardized testing creeps behind students like a shadow and where fun experiments take a back seat to rote memorization.

But in some ambitious K-12 schools across the country, philosophy courses have made tangible improvements to the way students learn.

In these classrooms, teachers tackle big concepts like ethics and epistemology. They ask, How can we know what we know? — a classic epistemological quandary — but they use Dr. Seuss to get there.

Inside the classroom

Jana Mohr Lone has taught philosophy at all levels, from preschool to college. For 20 years, she has directed the University of Washington Center for Philosophy for Children, and she’s the current president of PLATO, a nonprofit organization focused on bringing philosophy to schools.

Over that time, she’s learned an important lesson: It doesn’t take much to get kids thinking.

“Our general approach is to start off with some kind of stimulus,” Lone tells Tech Insider. For younger kids, that’s often a picture book or a game. In middle or high school it could be a novel or work of art. “Then we ask the children, ‘So what questions does this make you wonder about?'”

After the inevitable outpouring of curiosity, Lone says teachers will typically put the lesson to a vote — which question do people want to explore the most? The winning topic then forms the basis of a discussion.

Robert Benson/Getty Images

Pretty much anything is up for grabs.

Scout and Atticus Finch can stimulate a discussion on the nature of courage. “The Velveteen Rabbit” gets kids thinking about the question, “What is real?” Often, Lone says, the simplest stimuli can produce profound insights. In her 2012 book “The Philosophical Child,” she recalls one particularly poignant lesson involving the nature of existence.

After asking a fifth-grade class whether we can know for sure that we are real people and not part of a virtual simulation, a bright 10-year-old girl sitting up front offered her take.

“Okay,” the girl said, “maybe I can’t know that I am not just the mind of a computer or living in a cave and seeing only shadows. But what I can know is that if I’m thinking about what I can know, I can be sure that at least there is me thinking, even that’s all I can know about myself or anything else.”

Lone was blown away, she writes. “I told her that the philosopher René Descartes had come to a similar conclusion almost four hundred years ago.”

Set for life

Though formal research on the benefits of early exposure to philosophy is still light, anecdotal evidence from the front lines suggests clear benefits.

“It gives them all the skills we want them to learn,” Lone says. Learning philosophy has taught her students to listen better, accept different ways of seeing the world, speak clearly, and articulate their opinions.

One of PLATO’s chief goals is finding creative ways for philosophy to tiptoe into a system that hasn’t been all that accepting of disruption. Lone, for instance, only teaches once a week or every other week in her hometown of Seattle. Frequently, PLATO draws on graduate and doctoral students to work part-time in classrooms.

Graduate student Ariel Sykes has taught philosophy in elementary schools throughout the northeastern U.S..

“I find that students bring the conversation out into the schoolyard and use things we use during our discussions in everyday conversations,” Sykes says. Kids will ask their peers to repeat or clarify their previous point, request reasons if asked to do something, and seek to solve problems before arguing.

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The Dangerous Myth of the Bad Kid

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Huffington Post – Dani Bostick

It’s the second day of kindergarten and Sarah is sitting on the rug, playing with a new classmate’s hair. It’s fantastic hair, wild and curly. The teacher snaps at her, “Stop it!” Sarah is also sitting with her legs bent behind her like a W, perhaps because she just turned five she has low muscle tone, or perhaps she’s just more comfortable that way. “And, we sit crisscross apple sauce here!” yells the teacher, letting out an exasperated sigh.

A battle of wills ensues, and Sarah is banished off of the carpet to sit next to a classroom aide where a tantrum devolves into a full-on meltdown, while the teacher tries to bend her at the waste, showing her “how we sit here.” Her lanyard got stuck in Sarah’s hair, prompting more screams. She orchestrates a countdown from ten, as Sarah’s peers join in. Ten, nine, eight…. By now Sarah is throwing her shoes, and the teacher is wondering out loud, “What is wrong with her? She needs to learn we don’t do that here!” She was told later that she could not participate in a scavenger hunt around the school with the rest of her classmates because she had made “bad choices.”

I had been assigned to the classroom through a local university to observe a student teacher. I stand there mortified by the interaction. It is day two of kindergarten, and unfortunately, Sarah is already labeled “bad.” There is something wrong with her. The teacher believes this, and thanks to the public shaming, all of her classmates know it as well. It is likely this label will stick with Sarah and following her throughout her academic career. It will inform her self-concept and as she grows older, will dictate her choices and behavior until one day. It will have started with a curiosity-driven interaction with a classmate’s hair and her fateful preference to sit in a W instead of with her legs crossed.

I reported the incident to the principal who stared at me blankly and said, “What do you want me to do about this? It is the second day of school.” I reported it to the district, and was later told the teacher is an esteemed veteran. My direct employers, the university where the student teacher was enrolled, let me know I was a guest of the district. In other words, voicing my concerns was not good guest behavior.

In that moment, school, district, and institution tasked with training teachers had all conspired to perpetuate a dangerous, and disturbingly common myth, that some kids are just bad. The results of that mindset are devastating, and when that mindset is embraced in a classroom, where students eventually spend more time than they do with their families, it can have a destructive impact on our children, and society. For students whose behavior is a function of trauma, poverty, or other challenging circumstances, callous responses can galvanize destructive beliefs: “I can’t trust people. Adults hurt me. I have no hope. I am bad.”

In October, footage of a school resource officer manhandling a high school student went viral. Outrage followed. Incidents like the one I observed in that Kindergarten classroom happen every day and over time can be just as devastating as the violent outburst caught on video. The problem is, the Myth of the Bad Kid is much more insidious, often passing as an appropriate classroom management strategy. When schools, school districts, and teacher training programs normalize that belief, they are endorsing a attitudes and a behaviors that would be labeled as emotional abuse in an adult relationship.

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LightUp Kits Teach Electronics and Programming to Kids

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The Gadgeteer – Julie Strietelmeier

It takes almost no effort to get kids interested in technology because they are naturally drawn to gadgets and gizmos like smartphones and iPads. While playing games on these devices is a lot of fun for children, they don’t learn much from the time spent gaming. What if kids could play and learn important skills at the same time? LightUp kits are both fun and educational; they are specially designed magnetic circuit blocks that snap together and are used with a mobile app to allow kids (ages 5 – 17 years old) to explore the world of electronics and programming in a fun and simple way.

This post has been sponsored by Lightup.

The magnetic circuit blocks consist of basic components like a battery, LED and buzzer, to advanced components like a microprocessor. When kids snap them together they can build projects like a nightlight, music box, a TV remote and more.

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What Character Strengths Should We Focus On and How?

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MindShift – Katrina Schwartz

Educators of all ages, from kindergarten through college, are quickly realizing that academic skills aren’t enough to ensure student success. Increasingly educators and district leaders are trying to incorporate non-cognitive skills into the school day that they hope will help students develop the inner fortitude and confidence to push through personal and learning challenges. But even as character development programs have become more popular, there hasn’t been much consensus on which character strengths lead to the best long term results.

In a small scale study conducted in the Boston Area, Boston University Education Professor Scott Seider tried to determine which character strengths correlate with student success and examined how different approaches to character development impacted students. The results of his study are part of his book Character Compass: How Powerful School Culture Can Point Students Towards Success. Seider studied three charter schools within 10 miles of one another, all serving mostly children of color, and all performing well on standardized tests. The schools were similar in terms of structure, demographics and academic achievement, but each school chose to define and focus on character development in different ways.

Seider chose the schools for their similarities and because their character development programs fell into three categories: civic character, moral character, and performance character. He defines civic character as the strengths students need to be informed and compassionate citizens of the world. Moral character on the other hand is more connected to an individual’s ability to engage in ethical relationships with other people. And finally, Seider defines performance character as the skills students need to maximize achievement.

Seider gave students at all three schools a character survey at the beginning of the school year and again at the end with questions meant to measure empathy, integrity (strengths he defines as moral character), perseverance, daring/courage (which he defines as performance character), social responsibility and school connectedness (which he defines as ethical character). He compared GPAs and number of demerits as a way of assessing conduct. He also interviewed 15 students at each school about their experiences and spent between 15-20 days observing at each school.

MORAL CHARACTER

Boston Preparatory Charter School focused on moral character. “When I say moral character, I’m talking about an individual’s ability to engage in ethical relationships with other individuals,” Seider said as he explained the study and its results at a Learning and the Brain conference in Boston. Boston Prep focused on qualities like courage, compassion, integrity, perseverance and respect primarily through an ethics class students took every year from sixth grade through senior year of high school. In sixth grade students explored the idea of integrity and how it relates to telling the truth. In seventh grade they focused on responsibility for one’s actions, and in eighth grade they discussed how to stay true to oneself and the concept of authenticity.

Seider sat in on one 8th grade discussion about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person to be elected to political office in California. “Students were thinking through what it means to be true to yourself and connecting it to things inside and outside of school,” Seider said.

At the high school level, students read Plato’s social contract theory and discussed how it interacts with personal integrity. When Seider visited students were comparing the lives of Muhammad Ali and Pat Tillman, wrestling with the moral question of what to do when personal opinion doesn’t line up with the social contract.

“At the end of the year the students showed a higher level of commitment to integrity than students at the other two schools,” Seider said. And, at the high school level students seemed to feel more empathy. “Ethics class seemed to be slowing them down a little bit and had them thinking more about the decision they were making,” Seider said. That doesn’t mean students always made the right decision, but at least they were thinking about it.

PERFORMANCE CHARACTER

At Roxbury Charter Preparatory, a middle school, the focus is on performance character and qualities that help students maximize achievement. School leaders focus on things like grit, perseverance, and self-control primarily through discussion and practice during an advisory period. The school emphasized how effort leads to results with school wide competitions like a digits of pi memorization contest and a public speaking extravaganza where every student works to present a speech or poem to the student body.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Reasons Why We Chose To Homeschool

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Huffington Post | Education – Jennifer Bly

It never fails. When I tell someone, we homeschool, the inevitable question is, “Why?”

While I’m accustomed to answering with ease, I never share the full reasoning behind why we homeschool.

Education is a personal choice, and I’m acutely aware that my reasoning for why we homeschool may make others feel that their choices are less than optimal. I would like to emphasize that this is not the case. We made the decision to homeschool based on our girls, their personalities, and our experiences.

When we started homeschooling, we had one primary reason… my oldest daughter’s health and safety. You see, my oldest daughter has an anaphylaxis dairy allergy. The ingestion of raw dairy products is life threatening.

My husband and I, having been in the childcare/education system, know how stretched teachers and support staff are. In fact, we witnessed slip-ups where a child consumed something they shouldn’t have. We could not afford to take this risk with our daughter. For us, homeschooling felt like a life or death decision.

Now I understand that there are anaphylaxis children in the school system. Schools are far more aware of anaphylaxis now, but dairy is not a common anaphylaxis allergy. People often think of a dairy allergy as lactose intolerance or just an allergy to milk. However, my daughter is allergic to milk, yogurt, sour cream, butter, and so much more. Her allergy is to all dairy products and byproducts.

My daughter’s allergies started us on our homeschool journey, but now that we’re in it, even if my daughter outgrew her allergy, we would still choose home education.

Homeschooling is what works best for our family and here’s why:

We control the curriculum.

With homeschooling, I can choose the curriculum that best meets my child’s learning style.

Visual learner? No problem, we can incorporate that into our plans. Hands-on explorer? We can include materials and tools to facilitate hands-on learning.

I love that my children’s education is personalized especially for them!

A relaxed atmosphere.

Homeschooling, for the most part, is a much more tranquil atmosphere than the traditional school system. My girls can sleep in if they need to. They can learn in their pajamas and eat whenever their bodies demand food.

Our schedule is tailored to our needs. Yes, some days are far from relaxed because a child is grumpy, but for the most part, the calm days far exceed the intense ones.

It keeps me connected with my child’s education.

There have been countless times that I’ve had natural lessons come up in daily encounters and I was able to use it as an opportunity to enhance my child’s learning and curriculum.

Since I’m the one doing the planning and teaching, I’m acutely aware of what my child is (and will be exploring) throughout the school year. So, when opportunities present themselves, we seize them!

I couldn’t imagine not fully knowing what my child is learning in school!

My home, my values.

Yes, I’m Christian, but this goes beyond my faith. When I hear of grade 3 children coming home with horrifying language and graphic sexual “knowledge,” I shudder. Childhood is fleeting, and the innocence that used to last until a child was in grade 7 has shifted dramatically.

We live in a world where information is at our fingertips. If my child goes to school, they are at the mercy of the values held by the parents, teachers, and children of that school. I wouldn’t be able to stop the child who’s showing inappropriate content to my child on their smartphone at recess. I wouldn’t be able to shield my child from events and knowledge that are beyond her social-emotional developmental level.

Yes, some people may say I’m overprotective.

My response? Who cares if I’m overprotective or “sheltering” my child?! I want to preserve the joy and innocence of childhood. Life becomes hard very quickly… why rush it?

More time with my kids.

I love my children dearly. When I had my first daughter, I used to do a slight eyeball roll every time someone told me to enjoy the moments as they grow up quickly.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

And So, Without Ed-Tech Criticism…

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Hack Education – Audrey Watters

When I first started to think about what I wanted to say here today, I thought I’d talk about innovation and how confused if not backwards the ed-tech industry’s obsession with that term is. I thought I’d tie in Jon Udell’s notion of “trailing edge innovations,” this idea that some of the most creating and interesting things don’t happen on the bleeding edge; they’re at a different perpendicular, if you will. Scratch – and before Scratch, LOGO – work there, tinkering from that angle.

So I started to think about movements from margin to center, about cultural, social, political, pedagogical change and why, from my vantage point at least, ed-tech is stuck – stuck chasing the wrong sorts of change.

We’ve been stuck there a while.

This is me and my brother, circa Christmas 1984. (I know it’s Christmas because that’s when we got the computer, and in this photo it hasn’t yet been moved to the basement.) We found this photo when we were cleaning out our dad’s house this summer. Yes, that’s us and the LOGO turtle. My thoughts about this photo are pretty complicated: going through family photo albums, you can see – sometimes quite starkly – when things change or when things get stuck. This photo was from “the good times”; later images, not so much. And this photo reminds me too of a missing piece: somehow my interest in computers then never really went anywhere. I didn’t have programming opportunities at school, and other than what I could tinker with on my own, I did t get much farther than basic (sic).

Stuck.

So I want to talk to you today about how we – ed-tech – get unstuck.

Someone asked me the other day why I’d been invited to speak at a conference on Scratch. “What are you going to say?!” they asked, (I think) a little apprehensively. Their fear, I have to imagine, was that I was going to come here and unload a keynote equivalent of 1984’s “Two Minutes of Hate” on an unsuspecting European audience, that I would shake my fist angrily and loudly condemn the Scratch Cat or something. Or something.

I get this a lot: demands that I answer the question “why do you hate education technology so much, Audrey?” in which I usually refrain from responding with the question “why do you hate reading comprehension so much, Internet stranger?”

I’d contend that this nervous, sometimes hostile reaction to my work highlights a trap that education technology finds itself in – a ridiculous belief that there can be only two possible responses to computers in education (or to computers in general): worship or hatred, adulation or acquiescence. “You’re either with us or against us”; you’re either for computers or against computers. You have to choose: technological progress or Luddism.

It’s a false choice, of course, and it mostly misses the point of what I try to do in my work as an education technology writer. Often what I’m trying to analyze is not so much about the actual technology at all: it’s about the ideology in which the technology is embedded, encased and from which it emerges; and it’s about what shape technologies seem to think teaching and learning, and the institutions that influence if not control those, should take.

To fixate solely on the technology is a symptom of what Seymour Papert has called “technocentric thinking,” something that he posited as quite different from what technology criticism should do. Technocentrism is something that technologists fall prey to, Papert contended; but it’s something that, just as likely, humanists are guilty of (admittedly, that’s another unhelpful divide, no doubt: technologists versus humanists).

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

The Importance Of Playing Like A Kid

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Huffington Post – Jennifer S. White

Prioritizing pretend play in childhood — and beyond:

It’s a cold Saturday, my husband’s at work, and my two children and I are holed up in the house.

We break out the play food that the girls’ aunt made for them. I’m blown away by these handcrafted, wool-felted pieces — pepper rings, pepperoni, a burger, jelly, bread, buns, pizza sauce, two kinds of cheese, bologna, pizza crusts, watermelon, a dill pickle, bow-tie pasta, a fried egg, lettuce, tomato, mustard, ketchup, and many more items surround us as we sit cross-legged together on the living room floor.

The baby especially likes playing with the tinier foods — the little black olives and mushroom slices for the pizza are her favorites. She says “nom, nom, nom” as she holds them close to her lips, and pretends to chew.

My oldest daughter loves watching cooking shows. She carries spatulas, pots and bowls from the kitchen into the living room and mixes and creates, along with her favorite TV chefs.

She now expertly crafts watermelon sandwiches and double-decker pizza slices. She giggles and looks out of the corner of her eye for my reaction when she places her current obsession — yellow mustard — onto the play pizza as well.

Then we pick up, and we have a real-life snack. Snow appears through the window in spurts. I’m hoping that my husband will be home soon, so I’m hesitant to leave, even though the girls are clearly needing a change of scenery.

Instead, I get a wild idea to break out the dress-up clothes that I bought for my oldest daughter probably two years ago — before the baby was even here with us.

One morning, when my daughter was in school, I dashed from a yoga class to JC Penney. I’d never been in the store before, so I quickly hunted for the little-girls Disney section; my daughter’s school pick-up time fastly approaching.

I bought four dresses and three pairs of shoes. Glitter was all over my yoga pants as I piled this giant, puffy bag into the passenger seat of my Jetta and excitedly drove over to get her.

This Saturday, I found them at the top of her closet with the tags still on. She never got into playing princess dress-up. I stealthily look through this bag of clothing, trying to peek at the sizes and not get her interested in something that likely will no longer fit. I silently praise my earlier intelligent purchase — all of these dresses were too big at the time, but now they are exactly her size, or just small enough to still squeeze into.

I take the dresses out into the other room, and my girls’ faces light up. My oldest reaches out in awe for the Rapunzel dress. She immediately starts taking off her outfit so she can step into this sparkly choice. Her ecstatic expression makes my heart pound. The baby, however, is incredibly upset that nothing is in her size. She begins to cry.

I dash back into the bedroom, and then into the kitchen, and then I finally find her Halloween pumpkin costume haphazardly thrown onto the dining room buffet, from the last time she had wanted to randomly wear it. She wipes fat tears from her tiny cheeks, and grins hugely, reaching for the orange costume.

My husband didn’t arrive home from work for another few hours. In that span of time, we had changed into almost all of the dresses, and the girls had, at one point, added hats. I couldn’t find the shoes.

By the time he walked in the back door, it was as hushed and as quiet as possible, because the baby had gone down for a nap, and my oldest was watching Tangledin her Rapunzel dress. (She would turn away from the television to say, “Thank you, Mommy,” every now and then.)

He walks into the house and ooo’s and aaaah’s with complete sincerity at our daughter in her dress-up clothes. He goes to the one place that I hadn’t looked, and brings out three pairs of sequin-covered shoes to an exuberant, beaming child.

She alternately wears two pairs that miraculously still fit.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

The Change You Want to See in Your Children Starts With You

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Huffington Post | Parents – Adriana Sorgi

It is never too late to be a better parent. The best gift you can give your children is to do your inner work, to release the patterns that haven’t worked up until now and take a different direction — a direction more productive and more conducive to creating harmony with the whole family.

You can always course-correct from what has happened in the past by creating a healthier dynamic that contributes to the happiness of your whole family.

Remember that your children learn by example. If you want to see change in them, you must be that change, and you can start today.

As a single mother of two, I have been through many ups and downs with my own children. It’s been challenging, sometimes chaotic, frustrating and nerve-wracking to say the least.

I have tried many things to improve our communication, read many books about parenting, and implemented tools that I learned throughout my career as a life coach. All these — only to realize that, despite all my efforts, things were not getting better.

What more could I do, I wondered, in order to have the peace and harmony I was seeking so desperately? Every night, I would find myself completely drained and angry at my kids, waiting anxiously for them to go to sleep so I could have some silence and alone time. I was not enjoying the ride. I kept asking myself, what was I doing that was blocking the harmony?

Finally, I figured it out. I was trying too hard! I was being a control freak. And the more I tried to make things go my way, the more my kids would do things their way!

What I came to realize was that I had to let go of control and instead make my children a part of my team. I had been separating them from me by putting myself in a position where I was dictating orders “from on high” rather than creating healthy boundaries along with them.

Here is a good trick — remember hearing as a child, “My house, my rules”? How about reframing that into: “Our house, our rules”?

This doesn’t mean you give up your authority as a parent. Rather, it means that when the house rules are created and agreed on by everyone, there is no excuse for not following through. Your kids can clearly see what they ought to be doing, because everyone participated in the creation of the rules.

So you can start implementing these new tools in your home right away, I have created a five-point approach that will support you.

1. Create a mission statement.

This can be such a fun activity. Get a whiteboard and several colored markers, then gather the whole family in a place that is comfortable and has good energy. Ask your children one by one what is important for them. What makes them want to come home?

Write down all their thoughts and desires on a piece of paper first. Read them aloud together, and you’re likely to find that everyone wants some of the same things. By doing this, you are creating your relevant family values.

Now, here’s the fun part! Put the collective list up on the whiteboard. Let your children do it by going up to the board — or perhaps pass the board around and have each child participate by writing something.

You will be experiencing true teamwork!

Finally, put the board up in a place that is readily visible. That way you can refer to it whenever someone may need a reminder.

2. Respond versus reacting.

We all have the power to choose how to respond to a situation. As parents, we can easily get irritated and impatient while juggling so many things at the same time. But when we are reactive, we immediately create distance between us and our children.

By “reacting,” I am referring to yelling orders, lecturing and using corporal punishment. Such behavior contributes to a dysfunctional family dynamic. Children don’t respond well — they tend to exhibit unhealthy responses like shutting down or becoming angry. These children can grow up to be wounded adults with a lot of emotional issues.

Responding, on the other hand, means taking 100 percent responsibility for yourself and choosing to rise above the problem. You choose to have a dialogue with your children; you listen and respect their feelings without judging them. You set a tone of respect in service to re-connecting with them.

We model good behavior when we respond kindly but firmly. In that way, we set healthy boundaries and follow through. Trust me! Your children will respect you more.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Messaging Apps in Junior High and High School

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TechCrunch – Sarah Buhr

As Facebook and YikYak try to grow a younger audience, a startup that taps into one of the key attribute of teen users – no money for data plans – is blowing up.

Jott, a messaging app that works without a data plan or WiFi connection, has caught on among junior high and high school students, according to co-founder Jared Allgood. He says the app more than doubled to half a million active users in March, up from 150,000 active users previous.

Allgood told TechCrunch that the app continues to gain momentum, adding 15,000 to 20,000 users a day. That’s consistent with numbers from App Annie. The app started ranking steadily in the top 75 on iOS for social networking in the U.S. in mid-April.

The reason? Teens who don’t have a data plan that will allow them to text are using their iPods and iPads to message each other on a closed network within a 100-foot area within school limits.

About 88 percent of 13-17-year-olds have a cell or smartphone, according to the latest numbers from Pew Research. However, not all of them get a data plan or a way to access the Internet during school hours, leaving many of them without a way to non-stop text each other throughout the day.

Text messages usually travel by way of your phone to the nearest cell tower. Then they get routed to other cell towers to reach the person you are texting. However, Jott can send messages from one device to another without any cell service as long as those texting are within close enough proximity to each other.

It does this by using something called a mesh network that operates on Bluetooth low energy or using a router that can reach within 100 feet of each user. It’s the same way FireChat, a group messaging app, does this, but Jott can also message individuals within your network.

And that ability to easily message peers directly within a network is the key. While apps such as Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram rank at the top for social networks among teens, texting reigns supreme. According to Niche data, about 87 percent of teens text daily, compared to 61 percent of those who say they use Facebook, the next most popular choice.

It’s tough to know why texting is the preferred method. What is out there is mostly anecdotal. Perhaps texting is simply the easiest form of direct messaging to one’s friends? Whatever the reason. They do a lot of it. More than adults. Girls send, on average, about 3,952 text messages a month, and boys send closer to 2,815 text messages a month, according to the Pew study.

What we do know is that teens who own a smartphone text a lot more than those who don’t. “Fully 2 in 5 heavy texters (41%) and a third (33%) of medium texters own a smartphone, compared with just under 1 in 5 (19%) of lighter texters,” a Pew study from 2012 found.

This may be why Jott has caught on so fast, particularly among junior high schoolers who are less likely to have a smartphone than older teens. Jott provides a way for those without a smartphone or the data plan needed to text to still message with their friends.

“While not everyone has a data plan, most kids have an iPod,” Allgood, who has a tween daughter himself, said.

Jott started testing the closed, or mesh network idea with a few select schools in March. That seems to have been the spark that led to a ginormous amount of growth for the startup. The effect was viral. Kids using the app in each school told their friends.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Amelia Earhart’s 1933 Advice To A Teen Girl

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Huffington Post | Parents – Jenavieve Hatch

“I should certainly not discourage you.”

An encouraging letter Amelia Earhart wrote to a 13-year-old female fan in 1933 has resurfaced in 2016.

The note, in which Earhart gives some solid advice to a teen who hopes to become a pilot, is currently for sale with the Philadelphia-based Raab Collection. (Scroll down to read the letter in full.)

Earhart broke new ground for women in aviation when she became the first womanto fly solo across the Atlantic ocean in 1932. Given that major accomplishment, she knew a thing or two about breaking into a male-dominated industry.

In the 1933 letter, Earhart explained the steps required to become a pilot. She advised her fan to have a physical examination from a physician in the Department of Commerce before being cleared to fly. Then, if taking flying lessons wasn’t feasible, Earhart encouraged her to enter the aviation industry by other means, by doing clerical work or working in factories. She also offers to answer any other questions her teen fan has.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

The Day I Deleted Minecraft — A Letter To My Son

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MamaLode – Jennifer Reinharz

Dear Bubbe,

I never intended to do it; really. One second it was a quivering icon, the next it was gone.

Just. Like. Magic.

Honestly, it brought on a smile. I’m not trying to be mean. Chalk it up to a Mommy epiphany, a moment of clarity. The day I deleted Minecraft, I liberated myself and you of a virtual, addictive burden. Pressing that shaky, little X ushered you back to real life. That made me happy.

In the beginning, I was a fan.

Compared to the other choices the video game world has to offer, I could see why you wanted to tap the piggy bank to invest in one that requires players to scavenge for resources, earn survival treasure, design landscapes, construct villages, and defend against intruders. As a lifelong rock collector, forager of sorts, visual thinker, and creative designer it appealed to many of your natural sensibilities.

A popular topic of discussion at summer camp and later in the school cafeteria, Minecraft was also something to bond over with friends. Game play and conversations led to art projects, dissecting handbooks, sharing song parodies, and pretend play. It was a vehicle to stretch your imagination, apply ingenuity, problem solve, and socialize. So like organized sports, enrichment programs, and play dates, this Mommy approved video game quickly became outsourcing I could justify.

Not only did I feel like I was doing right by your development; it kept you busy, safe, in an earshot and out of my hair all at the same time. My afternoon was still my own and I didn’t necessarily have to entertain or engage with you all that much.

Then I began to notice screen time and giving up the screen made you cranky and angry. You responded less to Dad and me, ignored guests, and blew off friends playing outside. Preferred downtime was spent in the basement; alone in a Minecraft cave.

Even with the game shut off, I was living with a one note Bubbe on Enderman autopilot. It was all you wanted to talk, draw, write, and think about. When The Skootch got access, twice the misery ensued.

So in an effort to find balance, we set up a schedule to earn and limit play time.

It didn’t work.

The timer chime was drowned out daily by your pleading, sometimes screaming voice, “I wasn’t done; I just found iron, I need a diamond sword, a creeper destroyed my supplies and all I have left is a raw chicken!”

It was only after the drama escalated to the point where I found myself ripping the iPad from your grip and yelling back, “Who cares; it’s not real!” that I knew we needed a big change.

All craziness combined led me to Deletion Day.

In the future, I’m not ruling out screen time completely; that would make me a hypocrite but Minecraft was sucking wind from your childhood and it needed to go away.

Proof of my decision came the morning after Deletion Day when I read anarticle about Steve Jobs; the man who invented the tablet on which you play. He was brilliant for many reasons, particularly in his choice to limit his own children’s access to technology.

A few hours later, you played with months old Minecraft Legos for the first time and said, “Mom, this is fun. I never would have known if I kept playing video games.” I then knew we were heading in a better direction.

Your Lego comment got me thinking more about fun and parent approved outsourcing, both today and when I was your age.

Like you, I kept busy after school and like you, my mother gravitated toward outsourcing. She didn’t have insight into child development or the value of play, I’m just pretty sure that when she came home from work, she didn’t want to see my face until dinner.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Think You Stink at Math? Amazon Wants to Change That.

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Re/code – Jason Del Rey

“I stink at math.”

If you have kids, you’ve probably heard that phrase — or maybe you’ve even uttered some variant of it yourself. But in a world where good jobs increasingly require good math skills, that mind-set should no longer be acceptable, according to Rohit Agarwal, general manager of Amazon’s Education business unit.

“We believe that the attitude that it’s okay not to be good at math is just becoming too common,” Agarwal said in an interview. “Developing good math skills is essential to success at life.”

So Amazon is trying to do something about it. The company, along with partners including Stanford University and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, is launching an initiative called “With Math I Can,” in an effort to get teachers and students to change their ideas about the subject.

The initiative is centered around a dedicated website with free resources for teachers to embrace what’s known as a “growth mind-set” in the education field. That means teaching students “to embrace a challenge,” according to Agarwal. “You see effort as a path to improving, and you learn from feedback.” A counter on the website will track how many students and teachers take a pledge to change their mind-sets.

If successful, Amazon hopes that the program will also help encourage more girls to stay positive with the subject matter through middle school, when many “tend to believe they’re no longer good at math,” said Meera Vaidyanathan, the director of curriculum products at Amazon Education.

Both Agarwal and Vaidyanathan joined Amazon in 2013, when Amazon acquired TenMarks, the online math education company co-founded by Agarwal.

Here’s the video promoting the initiative:

Read the original article by Jason Del Rey

by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Are Kids Of Working Moms Better Prepared For Their Future Careers?

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Fast Company – Lisa Evans

YOUR MOMMY GUILT MIGHT BE MISPLACED: A NEW BOOK SHOWS THAT WORKING MOTHERS RAISE GREAT KIDS.

Juggling work and family obligations makes working mothers feel that they’re always dropping the ball somewhere. When you’re at work, you’re missing time away from your kids. When you’re at home, you’re missing out on networking events that could advance your career. But a recent book by Pamela Lenehan, My Mother, My Mentor: What Grown Children of Working Mothers Want You to Know, spells out the many benefits children receive from mothers who work outside the home.

“Women want to be perfect at work, and we want to be perfect at home, but it’s hard to be perfect at anything,” says Lenehan. While many working mothers will question at least once whether they should just drop it all and stay at home, Lenehan conducted a survey of over 1,000 grown children and working mothers and found being a working mom actually has substantial benefits to children.

STRONG WORK ETHIC

Parents know modelling is the best way to instill behaviors and values, so it should come as no surprise that the children of working mothers Lenehan surveyed reported that watching their mothers going to work every day instilled in them a strong work ethic, more so than the children whose mothers stayed at home.

INDEPENDENCE

“Working mothers know they’re not going to be there for everything, so they deliberately tried to have their children be more independent,” says Lenehan. Allowing children to walk to school by themselves, for example, dress themselves, and play by themselves instilled a greater sense of independence, rather than moms who stayed at home and were available to their children 24/7.

RESILIENCE

The children of working mothers reported being able to solve their own problems and bounce back from tough times better than the children of stay-at-home moms. “Because the mothers knew that they wouldn’t be there all the time, they had to give children the skills to solve problems,” says Lenehan.

PREPARED FOR THE WORK WORLD

Watching their mothers deal with challenges at work helped children feel better prepared for the working world. “A number of these children had seen their mothers get laid off in corporate downsizing or heard about problems with bosses or difficult coworkers, so they felt that when they got to work, they knew that there were going to be issues, but they felt they had these skills on how to address these issues,” says Lenehan.

The children of working mothers also felt that they had a wider professional network to tap into when it came time to seek career guidance. Although few of the children Lenehan interviewed actually ended up working in the same field as their mothers, they reported that their working mothers were able to connect them with a friend, or a friend of a friend, in the field they were interested in to provide expert advice. Although working fathers were also able to provide assistance in this area, Lenehan reports that mothers were often the ones who helped children with their resumes, articulate what they were looking for in a career, and find the right job.

DAUGHTERS BENEFIT MOST

One Harvard found daughters of working mothers earned 23% more than daughters of stay-at-home moms and climbed higher on the corporate ladder (over 33% held supervisory positions, compared to 25% of daughters of stay-at-home moms). Lenehan, too, found grown women reaped the greatest benefit of having a working mother growing up, likely because they were able to recognize that the struggles they faced in balancing family and work were the same struggles their mothers overcame.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Blunt Prescriptions For Parenting

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Forbes – Rodger Dean Duncan

We recently welcomed beautiful Adeline into our family. She’s our first great grandchild. As I looked into her eyes for the first time, I found myself wondering what life would be for her. What would the world be like when she’sa parent and grandparent? Or, even less remotely, what would the world be like only a few years from now when she’s a teenager?

One thing’s for certain: society has undergone seismic changes since I was a teenager more than half a century ago. In fact, we’ve seen huge change in only the past couple of decades.

For our children and for the rest of us, much of that change is troubling.

By nearly every measure, American children are falling behind. In the 1980s, American kids were world leaders in academic achievement. They were less likely to be anxious and depressed than kids born elsewhere. They were happier than their age peers in France or South Africa or Australia.

But not now. Today, American children are ten times more likely to be medicated for ADHD, anxiety, depression and related ailments compared with kids in Scotland, Switzerland or New Zealand. And today, American kids rank between #17 and #22 on academic achievement measures, struggling to keep pace with Slovenia and Latvia and far behind Poland and Switzerland.

There are multiple causes behind these effects, but parenting (or a lack thereof) seems to be at the core. And with more and more parents grappling with the challenges of work-family balance, the problem doesn’t seem to be getting better.

One expert who offers a bundle of sane, straight talk on the issue is Dr. Leonard Sax, a practicing family physician and psychologist. His latest book is The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups.

Why would I interview a child psychologist when my own professional focus is on leadership? I’ll answer with a question of my own: What leadership role is more important than that of parent? You may be a great leader in the workplace. Good for you and for the people you lead. But the leadership you provide within the walls of your own home will have a truly lasting effect, possibly for many generations into the future.

The advice prescribed by Dr. Sax may be hard for some parents to swallow. After all, many of them grew up with the same kind of parenting they’re using with their own children today. But sometimes the very best medicine is an honest evaluation of our own habits. Dr. Sax shows the way.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Why Minecraft Is Important For Every Fan Of The Game

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The Guardian – Keith Stuart

At the densely crowded Bett show, a mammoth education technology conference taking up most of London’s ExCel venue, a vast audience has gathered to watch one particular demonstration.

It is Microsoft’s newly announced Minecraft: Education Edition, a special version of the hugely successful building sim, specifically customised for the classroom environment.

As the company representative highlights the main features, spectators photograph every single powerpoint slide. Behind the stage there’s a demo area with dozens of laptops running an early version of the new edition – all lined up on tables designed to resemble the game’s simple wooden blocks.

There is a constant throng of excitable children, all desperate to play. Minecraft is a big attraction and Microsoft knows it.

Just a week before Bett, the company announced that it had purchased MinecraftEDU, an educational version of the game, which was already being used in hundreds of schools all over the world. That product was designed and distributed by a small Finnish-American outfit, TeacherGaming, and while Microsoft says it won’t shut EDU down, the game won’t be receiving any new updates or support.

Minecraft: Education Edition will effectively be a replacement, developed in-house at Mojang in cooperation with a team at Microsoft’s Redmond campus. The new product features a complete version of Minecraft Windows 10 Edition, the refreshed version of the main game released as a beta last year, but adds extra functionality for teachers.

There is, for example, a better in-game map – now called the Locator Map – which, when a class is playing together in a shared Minecraft world, lets everyone see exactly where everyone else is and what they’re doing – handy for teachers who want to keep a close eye on wayward pupils.

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Also useful for guiding activities in the world are two new teacher-only controls: Build Deny and Build Allow. The former is an invisible block type that can be placed around a model to stop pupils modifying it – it’s designed to stop the sort of vandalising and trolling that can ruin multiplayer classroom building sessions.

It could also be used to restrain building projects, requiring students to work within more confined spaces and thereby think more carefully about construction space and impact.

The new game also adds a camera to the inventory. This allows children to quickly and easily take photos and videos of their projects, or even put the camera on a tripod to take selfies. Subsequent images are automatically placed in a zip file which downloads to their desktops – and to their teacher’s machine.

It is, according to Microsoft, more intuitive and adaptable than using the Print Screen function, and also allows teachers a better method of assessing student work.

Pupils can use the new in-game camera to take snapshots and selfies Photograph: Microsoft

So what will this work actually entail? Schools have already been using Minecraft for several years in a variety of projects. The game includes elements of building, farming, mining and engineering, so teachers have used it to explore everything from architecture and physics to ecology, sustainable agriculture and history.

During the Bett presentation, Microsoft showed how a school in Scotland got children to redesign Dundee’s waterfront area in Minecraft, while sixth grade pupils at a school in Seattle used the game to model a river and learn about its ecosystem by damming the flow in different locations.

“Some of the simulations we’ve seen are incredible,” says Deirdre Quarnstrom, who’s heading up the Education Edition project at Microsoft, after three years as chief of staff on Xbox. “We saw one school building a simulation of the great fire of London. Children were able to use TNT to blow up one of the houses in the middle to start the fire – it gave them the chance to see the enormity of it.

“One thing we often see is students building a representation of their school in Minecraft. They need to go out of the classroom, measure and estimate, and work out who’s going to build the cafeteria, the gym, the science lab … what materials they should use – it requires collaboration and a bunch of different skills, including maths, art and design.”

The aim with the Education Edition, she says, is to continue the work of MinecraftEDU, but to simplify the process and gradually add functionality. A key element is the fact that the new version features a more robust peer-to-peer server infrastructure, which means any laptop in the classroom can run an online Minecraft world that all the other students can join – the school doesn’t need to buy and maintain a dedicated server computer, which can be costly and complicated.

MinecraftEDU could use peer-to-peer networking as well but it wasn’t straightforward and without technical staff on-hand some teachers found it intimidating.

Microsoft has also set up a dedicated Minecraft Education website, where it is sharing projects and class plans, as well as educational maps, which can be downloaded to the classroom. Students can access the game using an Office 365 login, which means they’re also able to work on projects from home (it’s also possible to import and export map files between the Education and Windows 10 editions).

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off

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The New York Times – Adam Grant

THEY learn to read at age 2, play Bach at 4, breeze through calculus at 6, and speak foreign languages fluently by 8. Their classmates shudder with envy; their parents rejoice at winning the lottery. But to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, their careers tend to end not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Consider the nation’s most prestigious award for scientifically gifted high school students, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, called the Super Bowl of scienceby one American president. From its inception in 1942 until 1994, the searchrecognized more than 2000 precocious teenagers as finalists. But just 1 percent ended up making the National Academy of Sciences, and just eight have won Nobel Prizes. For every Lisa Randall who revolutionizes theoretical physics, there are many dozens who fall far short of their potential.

Child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses who change the world. We assume that they must lack the social and emotional skills to function in society. When you look at the evidence, though, this explanation doesn’t suffice: Less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems. A vast majority are well adjusted — as winning at a cocktail party as in the spelling bee.

What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original. They strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers. But as they perform in Carnegie Hall and become chess champions, something unexpected happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.

The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies, but rarely compose their own original scores. They focus their energy on consuming existing scientific knowledge, not producing new insights. They conform to codified rules, rather than inventing their own. Research suggests that the most creative children are the least likely to become the teacher’s pet, and in response, many learn to keep their original ideas to themselves. In the language of the critic William Deresiewicz, they become the excellent sheep.

In adulthood, many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations. Yet “only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators,” laments the psychologist Ellen Winner. “Those who do must make a painful transition” to an adult who “ultimately remakes a domain.”

Most prodigies never make that leap. They apply their extraordinary abilities by shining in their jobs without making waves. They become doctors who heal their patients without fighting to fix the broken medical system or lawyers who defend clients on unfair charges but do not try to transform the laws themselves.

So what does it take to raise a creative child? One study compared the families of children who were rated among the most creative 5 percent in their school system with those who were not unusually creative. The parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of fewer than one rule.

Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it’s easy to thwart. By limiting rules, parents encouraged their children to think for themselves. They tended to “place emphasis on moral values, rather than on specific rules,” the Harvard psychologist Teresa Amabile reports.

Even then, though, parents didn’t shove their values down their children’s throats. When psychologists compared America’s most creative architects with a group of highly skilled but unoriginal peers, there was something unique about the parents of the creative architects: “Emphasis was placed on the development of one’s own ethical code.”

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog

Design Thinking and Gamification

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eLearning Industry – Leticia Lafuente López

Design Thinking And The Application Of Lego Serious Play

Why is Design Thinking so important to solve real life projects? What does gamification have to do with it? In this article we will see the studies and methodologies that are taking place in Spain throughout different workshops conducted by Fausto Camacho.

I accompanied Beatriz Valderrama, a professional colleague. I had met her by chance that morning at an event organized by the Chambers of commerce and after getting to know her agenda, I followed her for the rest of the day and evening.

Arriving at five at the coworking space for the workshop “Design Thinking with Lego® Serious Play®”, we were told the seats were limited, as the methodology did not allow “silent witnesses” and I should wait to see if drop outs occurred to participate.

I really did not know what to expect. Beatriz encouraged me to stay, just in case. After a while, they confirmed that one of the twelve selected to attend the free workshop of Lego® Serious Play® dropped out and I could stay.

I had read something about Lego initiatives for companies and schools abroad. Two weeks later, the facilitator, Fausto Camacho, confirmed that the method began in Denmark in the 90s, when they realized that the sale of toys was stopping because children were playing more and more with the video consoles. Lego then hired a consultant and this resulted in a new methodology, which walked parallel to Lego but without belonging to the organization: The Lego® Serious Play®.

Desing Thinking Workshop: Fist Practice

During the workshop, 12 people sat in a room around a large table. In front of each of us there were two clear bags of Lego (just as the ones you get at the airport to put the bottles with liquids to pass the control zone). One of them contained a few pieces, orange and yellow ones; the other was larger and contained many more pieces of all sizes and colors. We begin with the small bag. The task the facilitator requested us was individually: “Build a duck. You’ve got one minute”.

As the exact measurement of time has always been a cabal to me, even with the watch ahead, I thought this task had to be done immediately, so I got carried away by the maternal instinct and thought, “Nothing can be left away to build this creature”. And I decomposed the duck: “Head, beak, wings, body, tail, legs. I think nothing is left”. I used a piece to represent each item, in order to make it a “complete” being, and I thought the others would be able to put it back on his head.

I finished first, and my surprise was complete when seeing that all people took pains to represent the ducky shower, Donald Duck, any normal duck, but really, duck-shaped and everything. After the given minute, the facilitator asked us to explain what we had done, if we felt satisfied for having done it that way and best of all: “How we had felt doing the duck”.

How to explain that this messy pile of pieces put together was a duck for me? I remembered the chefs making the deconstruction of the food, and I said, “I made a Duck deconstruction. It has everything, just take a look at it and imagine it”.

It had been just three minutes workshop and the methodology started working: 12 people with 12 visions of a duck, with 12 ways to translate it, with 12 ways to explain and feel it, in front of a few pieces of Lego that already were “our creature”. And in my project manager head, associations then began to emerge:

• Never take for granted that everyone understands the purpose of the project in the same way (if everyone understands it).
• Never assume that those who do understand the purpose in the same way also understand that the same steps and associated tasks are necessary to achieve it.
• Never assume that those who do understand the objective will work automatically for the project only, and not to feed their creativity, their ego or their personal interests.

Design Thinking Workshop: Second Practice

Now we should take the bigger bag and, with a given number of pieces, represent our ideal weekend. Translate a lot of feelings, memories, and desires to a few Lego pieces requires concentration. From hence the “serious game”, Fausto explained: “Serious” is not the opposite of “funny”; that is “boring”. A serious game can be fun, but requires active participation, effort, and work by those who run it, as well as a commitment to meet the objectives and assimilate the methodology of the game. That’s why it is serious.

I set to work and created my perfect weekend. This time we had a few minutes, since the task was a bit more complex than the last. We applied the method of successive approximations. Divergence was complete: Some wanted to be completely alone, other wanted to travel, others retreating into a bed of love, others stay in the car with their family, to talk and have a good time without teenagers running away or shutting in their room. The more conceptual the issue pictured, the greater divergence in the proposals. And everyone, without exception, had one; no one left the job half done. 12 visions of happiness put on the table, all represented in small pieces and with an overwhelming sincerity.

Fausto then explained that working with hands enables us to better express the concepts and to remove barriers, such as shame or prudence, to a group of strangers, obstacles that appear frequently when communicating with oral language. With our hands we are more honest, more authentic. And the ideas we communicate are so as well.

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by MindMake via MindMake Blog