We all love picture books for children but there is now one with a new twist, and a shake and a wiggle. Alice for the iPad is an amazing app which contains a slightly interactive version of this well loved story. It seems full of clever little touches like mushrooms that you can toss around a room with a twist of your iPad or an Alice who grows and shrinks as you move your gadget around.
I found this article at Parent Dish written by Christopher Healy and it raised some interesting thoughts on my mind. Link to source article below.
“You don’t need to work very hard to decipher the message behind Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.
The new ABC reality series, which documents the amiable British chef’s campaign to reform school lunch programs, doesn’t shy away from blatant, unequivocal statements about how American schoolchildren have horrible eating habits.
But there’s also a subtler (perhaps unintended) moral that viewers can draw from the show: The reading habits of these kids are just as bad.
On the show’s second episode, which aired this past Friday, Oliver presented a classroom full of kindergartners with a visual pop quiz on produce. He held up one vegetable after another and asked the children what it was. The kids couldn’t identify any of them (as far as the program’s editing showed us, at least).
Many of the veggies received nothing but blank stares, and the ones that did inspire the children to take guesses only garnered wrong answers (beets were thought to be celery, an eggplant mistaken for a pear). Very common food items, like tomatoes, potatoes and cauliflower stumped the kids.
The scene is rather unsettling, really, and makes the obvious point that these children have had little or no exposure to fresh produce. But that’s not all it tells us.”
Some very interesting comments have also been left. Personally I find it shocking that kids can’t identify vegatables such as a potato [I can understand not being able to identify a beet] don’t parents go shopping with their children or prepare freshly made meals at home?
By Kim Asche
University of Minnesota Extension
Regional Office, Hutchinson
To promote young children’s delight in talking, listening, reading and writing adults need to provide a variety of interesting language experiences. Children who have reading difficulties in the primary grades often had limited early literacy learning experiences.
Children with reading difficulties have:
less letter knowledge
less sensitivity to the notion that the sounds of speech are distinct from their meaning
less familiarity with the basic purpose and mechanisms of reading
poorer general language ability
Children who are skilled readers:
understand the alphabet and letters
use background knowledge and strategies to obtain meaning from print
can easily identify words and read fluently
Activities that prepare young children for learning to read, emphasize counting, number concepts, letter names, shapes, sounds, phonological and phonemic awareness, models of adult interest in literacy, and independent and cooperative literacy activities.
This video was prepared by the UK branch of Dorling Kindersley Books. Originally meant solely for a DK sales conference, the video was such a hit internally that it is now being shared externally. … Well worth a look - very clever.
Given that children now spend more than seven hours a day with their TV’s, computers, cellphones, and other electronic media—more time than they spend in school and more than many of them sleep—we parents have got to get smart about our children’s media use and how it affects their physical and mental health, and we need to develop a strategy for managing media.
Schools are about the future, learning skills and gaining knowledge to broaden our horizons. So you would think that this forward-looking perspective makes educational establishments a perfect place to study sustainability, which is all about protecting our environment for present and future generations.
You may think that schools would have sustainability high on their agenda, but Mark Orlowski found that this isn’t necessarily the case when he started examining how green and socially responsible college and universities are. He’s head of the Sustainable Endowments Institute, which issues an annual College Sustainability Report Card.
Listen to the full interview here which was broadcast on Sea Change Radio.
Co-Host Kelsey Flynn then chats with Josh Stoffel, the new Sustainability Coordinator at the University of Massachusetts, and Monty Archbald, chair of the Green Campus Committee at Greenfield Community College. And finally, Bill talks with Neil Drobny of the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University.
So if schools are preparing our children for the future is enough covered in the curriculum about protecting the future via sustainability? How far does your school/college support sustainability? What do your kids learn about this in their school/college?
New research has shown that using abbreviated words such a “l8r”, “lol”, and the hundreds of other short forms is actually beneficial to both children’s spelling and literacy skills.
The research, carried out at the University of Coventry, involved children between the ages of 8 and 12. It found those kids that regularly sent/received text messages to have better literacy skills. This repeated use of text language tests their English skills and requires the learning of correct spellings. The study proposes that to create the short form word they need to understand and know the original too.
January 23 celebrates National Handwriting Day. I admit my own handwriting has become worse as I have become more comfortable with a keyboard and screen than a pen and paper. But what about our kids? My own children prefer to type up their homework than write it. Is the art of handwriting to become a lost skill?
“Though computers and e-mail play an important role in our lives, nothing will ever replace the sincerity and individualism expressed through the handwritten word,” David H. Baker, WIMA’s Executive Director, is quoted as saying on the WIMA Web site.
Publisher Jeremy Ettinghausen discusses the “We Tell Stories” project, which aimed to tell stories using innovative online formats. The project broadcast stories live online as authors wrote them and utilized tools like Twitter and Google Maps. —– Matt Locke of Channel 4 Education and Jeremy Ettinghausen of Penguin Books discuss how hyper-connectivity, interactive media and the changing demands of 21st century audiences are transforming stories and storytelling.
Curtis Bonk, professor emeritus at Indiana University, focuses on the idea of technology as a way to have multiple perspectives on international matters and analyze data at a deeper level for school pupils. This short video discusses some ideas for using technology in the classroom to enhance a students understanding of a concept at a deeper and a global level. Transcript below.
Robin Good: I am receiving this idea that those kids and those pioneers among us pushing the envelope will be the models of this emerging revolution, but the resistance from the existing educational system is very strong.
Also what I noticed is that these so-called digital natives are not as schooled as they are painted to be. They are cool because they have those tools as natural tools in front of them, but most of the time they are clueless on the best use of these tools on themselves, out of the very easy superficial social tools that they start to learn right away.
Digital natives do not seem to get what are the possibilities in front of them because they do not really have models inside their educational institutions that help them think critically about the opportunities available to them. The education system also makes them think in ways quite opposite in the way of forming them as humans that can have value inside society, that are kind of opposite to the once being offered by those very technologies. I am having some conflicts with all that. Curtis Bonk: Let’s think about the Flat Classrooms Project.
The Flat Classrooms Project is the only one discussed in my book, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat book, Don Tapscott’s WIKINOMICS book and Growing Up Digital.
What they do in the flat classrooms, in Digiteen Project, they take a book like mine, or whatever book they might have, my blended book or whatever they have got, and they analyze the book. And in this case, these kids in secondary schools, work with other kids around the world to understand the technologies that make learning open. This semester they are using my book actually, The World is Open book. It is making them aware of what are the technologies for learning. Last year they looked at Growing Up Digital, the book from Don Tapscott, and they analyzed it across the world.
You are right, kids today have pretty savvy skills for their mobile devices, they can use them for chats and all this. But they are not for learning.
How do we transform the mobile devices or these synchronous conferencing tools?
In the Flat Classrooms Project they use Ning to form groups with other kids around the world, wikis to summarize the book across cultures, video conferencing like this to discuss what they have learned and do peer interaction. They use other kinds of tools like Twitter, microblogging and blogs. How can that one-off project become the norm?
How can those synchronous as well as asynchronous collaborative technologies push all through all schools? This is the power of technology I have been talking about since 1987. I think that video conference like this can let kids stand in each others shoes. They can see perspectives. That to me can change the whole teaching and learning arena. We have to pushing the global head, international head for perspective taking.
So I understand people in Italy better, which I do not admittedly, or people in Pakistan or some other places around the world. To me this is the most powerful way to use technology. It is to do cross-cultural collaboration like the ePals projectsand others, there is something called the IEARN Project. That will get kids in K-12 schools thinking about collaboration, teaming, these digital skills that you are talking about to critically analyze data. Not just accept what they see, but to analyze it with their peer groups. When they see a group in Italy critiquing a document that they thought was great, they will see that they really were not thinking about the credibility of the sources, the quality of the resources.
When I have done any international collaboration with my students, with my teachers, they see that once we go to Finland, Peru or Korea, those students are analyzing the data in a different way, and they are opened up to the fact that they are really not going as in-depth as they need to go. I really think that international collaboration pushes us up to ego-centric points of view to multiple perspectives. That is one way of using technology that can help with this digital teen issue.
What a simple concepts for using technology in a way that opens children up to the powerful way in which these technologies can be used for collaborative learning at a global level.
