Seems low - especially for kids growing up with tablets, smartphones, DVRs, etc
From Andrew Laughlin … Average child born today 'to spend quarter of life watching a screen':
The average child born today in the UK will have spent almost a quarter of their life watching non-work-related screen technology by the time they reach 80, a new study has claimed.
First Grader Becomes Youngest Person to Ever Develop a Mobile Game:
Remember the name Zora Ball. At seven years old, she's the youngest person to ever create a mobile game app, which was unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania's Bootstrap Expo last month.
Switching between media 27 times an hour is super multi-tasking – Wow!
From T.C. Sottek Study: 'digital natives' switch devices and platforms every two minutes, lack emotional engagement
A new study revealed by Time indicates that those who grew up with mobile tech are restless and emotionally detached consumers, switching between TVs, magazines, tablets, smartphones, or channels within platforms about 27 times an hour while experiencing “fewer highs and lows of emotional response.” The study says that these “digital natives” use media to “regulate their mood,” and that as soon as they’re bored or tired, they shift their attention elsewhere. And while a cursory glance at any vacuous, smartphone-equipped person might be enough to declare the findings plausible, Time’s study appears to be more scientific: researchers used biometric monitoring and point of view video capture to monitor people’s daily media consumption habits.
From Henry Blodget … The Amazing Media Habits Of 8-18 Year Olds
Our children are leading the world's transition to digital media.
This is in part because kids aren't afraid of technology, and in part because they haven't spent years getting use to anything else.
So if you want to get a sense of where the world's media habits are headed, it makes sense to watch what kids are doing.
The Kaiser Family Foundation did just that in a comprehensive survey released a while back.
Kaiser surveyed more than 2,000 families, and turned up all sorts of interesting information about the media habits of 8-18 year olds.
And bear in mind that this survey came before the iPad. And before smartphones really began to take hold.
Some key points:
- Kids consume a heck of a lot of media--and more all the time. Basically, if kids are awake, they're consuming media. And, increasingly, they're consuming multiple forms of media at the same time.
- Kids' print media consumption is tiny and falling.
From the Pew Internet Center's presentation Baby Boomers and Digital Technology:
Kids:
Socrative makes a web, iPhone and Android app that functions as a clicker system. After a teacher sets up an account, he or she receives a classroom number to give students. They simply enter the number in their phones or on a laptop and are ready to answer multiple choice questions, write short answers and compete in team challenges.
“They don’t have to create a user name and a password, it doesn’t have to be approved by an administrator, it doesn’t have to go through the school, we didn’t have to spend 45 minutes setting it up. … I get an excel sheet that I know what to do with,” she says.
Socrative co-founder Amit Maimon, who made the prototype while he was teaching a class at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, says about 3,000 teachers have signed up for the app since its beta launch without marketing in April. Eventually the company would like to sell a premium service with individualized performance data for schools, parents and students.
As IT Professionals, we've seen technology change very rapidly over the past 10 years. We've managed to keep pace and learn new skills on the job or through training courses. What might surprise you are the skills that high school kids possess today. Here is a look at some skills that many high school kid have - do you?I give you each of the 10 below and my take:
Child prodigy Adora Svitak says the world needs "childish" thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and especially optimism. Kids' big dreams deserve high expectations, she says, starting with grownups' willingness to learn from children as much as to teach.
The P&P Office Waste Paper Professor turns paper into pencils when you add the lead, glue, and power. It also includes a pencil sharpener on the side.photo via yankodesign
Free Technology for Teachers: Where Will Kids Put the Internet in the World?:
Read Write Web and Latitude recently conducted a survey of children in which they asked the kids to share the things they think computers and the Internet should do. As you might expect some of the responses were very imaginative. I look at the results of the survey as a preview of what computers and the Internet will do in the next decade or two. If you don't want to read the reports here and here, at least watch the video below summarizing some of the students' responses.
Latitude 42 Study Findings: Where Else Will Kids Think to Put the Web in the World? from latddotcom on Vimeo.
If Tom Sawyer were a schoolboy today, he’d be diagnosed with ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), writes Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post. And maybe CD (Conduct Disorder) too.
These days Tom and Huck would be on Ritalin. And Aunt Polly would be on Prozac.
Good science education at the earliest grades is supremely important, but in most classrooms it gets short shrift. Studies have found that children in kindergarten are already forming negative views about science that could cast a shadow across their entire educational careers. When researchers interviewed kindergartners from typical classrooms, barely a third of the children showed any knowledge of science, whether from school or other sources. Many children said that science was for older kids and adults, not kindergartners like them. They talked of science being about magic potions or dangerous chemicals; they said science is hard, science is not interesting, and ‘I am not good at science.’ Ask a room of five-year-olds to draw a scientist, and you will likely get lots of pictures of white-coated men in laboratories. Furthermore, even before first grade, fewer girls than boys say they like science.
Educational psychology researchers at Purdue University have developed an approach for teaching science in kindergarten that integrates it with language. The combination not only makes science instruction more appealing to teachers who are very mindful of language arts core curriculum requirements. It also enhances language learning by providing situations in which written language is used for a genuine purpose—recording and reporting predictions and observations—instead of a task devoid of any real context. And the kindergartners delight in learning words they would usually never encounter in kindergarten lessons, such as “excrete” (even if they cannot always spell them correctly).
The Purdue approach, the Scientific Literacy Project (www.purduescientificliteracyproject.org), introduces children to the most fundamental idea—that science is about carefully conducted inquiry to learn about the world—and shows them that everyone can do science. The lessons do not depend on expensive equipment or the latest in animations and computer games. Low-tech methods suffice, including experiments as simple as seeing if salt will dissolve, reading well-chosen nonfiction books—which many adults mistakenly imagine to be inappropriate or uninteresting to such young children—and maintaining individual science journals.
The researchers found that students participating in their project showed significant gains relative to those taking traditional classes. The kindergartners readily developed skills related to asking questions, conducting observations and experiments, drawing conclusions and sharing their findings—and had tremendous fun along the way. The project showed its worth for children of diverse ethnic and social backgrounds, and, most interestingly, it eliminated the gender gap in attitudes. A group at the University of Illinois at Chicago developed a similar project—Integrated Science-Literacy Enactments (www.uic.edu/educ/ISLE/)—for grades 1 through 3.
Children are natural scientists: not only are they inquisitive and energetic, but they have an instinct for controlled experimentation. The goal of science education at the earliest levels should be to encourage and refine children’s innate love of exploring the world around them and to help that enthusiastic behavior grow into true scientific literacy.
To answer the age-old question 'When am I going to use this?,' school systems in Calvert, Charles and St. Mary's counties are working to enrich their science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs by using hands-on teaching, guest speakers and real-world experiments and applications.
Work with your parents to create a Media Use Contract, which will establish rules and limits appropriate for you and your online activities. You should include in this how your parents intend to monitor you, your expectation of privacy and potential consequences should the contract be broken.Maybe it's time to sit down with your kids and write your own Media Use Contract.
Common Sense Media has released a national poll of teens and parents on social networking behaviors that confirms teenagers continue to find social media sites compelling and that parents may not be fully aware of what their offspring are doing online.
Highlights of the poll’s key findings include:
Not all activities are positive:
- 22% of teens check social networking sites more than 10 times a day, while only 4% of parents believe kids are checking that much
- 51% of teens check social networking sites more than once a day, while only 23% of parents say their kids check more than once a day
- 28% of teens have shared personal information that they normally wouldn’t have shared in public
- 25% of teens have shared a profile with a false identity
- 39% of teens have posted something they regretted
- 26% of teens have pretended to be someone else online
- 25% of teens have created a profile with a false identity.
- 24% of teens have hacked into someone else’s social networking account.
- 13% of teens have posted nude or seminude pictures or videos of themselves or others online.
Is your college Twittering to reach potential students?
They're not listening.
Our high schools are full of secretly texting, blithely unengaged adolescents, my colleague Dan de Vise reveals today in a story on a Montgomery County proposal to let students text during lunch. Dan’s story describes the situation well. Educators can’t keep up with the latest technocrazes. They banned cellphones for awhile, then decided they were necessary for emergencies. They figured no one would use them in class, forgetting that the text function allows a flurry of conversations without the miscreants making a discernible sound.
No one in the story asks my question: What do good teachers do about this? The best classes, in my experience, are the ones in which the teacher is holding a conversation with the entire class. Nobody is allowed to sit in a corner and dream about the prom, or text their dress choices to friends. The teacher has her eyes on the entire class, and is calling on everybody. If you are not paying attention, you are going to get caught. If the instructor is particularly good, the frequent texter decides what the class is doing is more interesting than sending another message. [Emphasis mine - MQ]
But since such classes are relatively rare, and teaching often involves the instructor talking and students listening, it is relatively easy for texters to avoid detection, and relatively common for them to be so bored they prefer to tune out and send messages. The standard adminstrative response is to try a new rule--like texting only during lunch--that might or might not alleviate the problem, when the answer to almost every educational mishap or distraction is not more rules, but more good teaching.
Ninety-seven percent of 12-17-year-olds play games using digital media, according to Pew Research. Our Courts believes that smart games have the capacity to reach kids in new ways.
Classroom games will target specific learning goals and outcomes matched to state standards. The games will be accompanied by guides for use, lesson plans, and offline classroom activities.
In the Our Courts virtual world, students will learn about the function of law in society, explore areas of law that interest them, and shape their virtual environment.
Our first two classroom games, Do I have a Right? and Supreme Decision will be available for the 2009-2010 school year.
Do I have a Right?
In this game, students will advise fictional kids about their rights under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. As they advance, additional rights are unlocked and the scenarios get more complex. This short game will teach students that they have important rights grounded in the specific Amendments to the Constitution.
Supreme Decision: Freedom of Speech
In this game, students will work for a Justice of the Supreme Court. They will use the First Amendment of the Constitution to help their Justice decide whether a fellow student, Ben, can be suspended from school for wearing his favorite band t-shirt. If they demonstrate good reasoning, students earn the chance to write the majority opinion for the Supreme Court. This game will ask students to explore the parameters of the First Amendments free speech guarantee so that they can assist the Justices in performing their constitutional role.
Former Supreme Court justice didn't get a computer until she was in her 40s, and she doesn't have a Facebook or Twitter account. But using technology, she said on April 7, is the way to teach students about the Constitution and inspire a renewed commitment to civics education in U.S. schools.
Since retiring from the Supreme Court three years ago, the 79-year-old justice has helped develop free web-based games to teach civics. Yet she admits her grandchildren are much more tech-savvy than she is.
'I don't even do much text messaging,' O'Connor told the Associated Press in an interview.
O'Connor spoke to middle school students, civics teachers, and the Florida Legislature about the games she has helped develop.
She told lawmakers that more people can name an 'American Idol' judge than the three branches of government. And she said she hopes her games help students learn how to analyze problems and develop arguments.
'You're going to have greater success if you teach it in ways that [students] like to use,' O'Connor said. 'They spend 40 hours a week, on average, in front of some type of screen.'
Two of the games O'Connor was promoting--'Do I Have a Right' and 'Supreme Decision'--are designed for middle school students and are intended to be played in class. The games should be ready this summer, she said, and are part of a project called Our Courts. The project is being backed by Georgetown University and Arizona State University but is largely privately funded.
