parents and technology – Page 30 – Media! Tech! Parenting!

Do We Support Those Digital-Age Students With Passionate Interests?

Posted on July 11, 2014March 18, 2019 by Marti Weston

Invent to Learn graphic art — Invent to Learn Graphic Art. Click to check out the book.

As my learning activities continue at the 2014 Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute (CMK14) I’ve spent a significant amount of time thinking about young 21st Century connected learners who come to our classrooms with special talents or unusual interests.

Often our classes include students who discover especially interesting topics, and these kids learn more and more until they develop expertise in the area. Sometimes the students go even farther with a subject, developing a passion and spending enormous amounts of personal time looking for more to learn. Last year at my school a fifth grader demonstrated, over and over, his passion for aviation and his all-consuming interest continues to thrive.

Cam Perron is just such a learner (watch his TEDTalk). Continue reading “Do We Support Those Digital-Age Students With Passionate Interests?” →

21st Century Learning, digital learning resources, parents and technology, workshops and conferences

Constructing Modern Knowledge: Sometimes Out of My Comfort Zone

Posted on July 9, 2014July 9, 2014 by Marti Weston

CMK 2014 — Click to visit the CMK14 site.

Occasionally we educators (and parents, too) participate in a learning experience that requires us to struggle for understanding and work hard to figure out what’s happening. Young learners go through this situation day after day in their school lives, even in the most wonderful classrooms. Adults not so much.

I’m in the middle of a challenging learning experience right now. This week the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute (CMK14) requires me to stretch. I’m expected to learn new things, figure out problems, and use all sorts of materials to invent, explore, and, yes, construct new ideas and information. Sometimes the work is heavy with digital materials and sometimes we use resources that have little to do with technology. It’s all about ideas and self-directed learning. No one tells me what to do or what to choose, but plenty of people are around to help me once I’m engaged with a task. Continue reading “Constructing Modern Knowledge: Sometimes Out of My Comfort Zone” →

21st Century Learning, collaborating with kids, digital kids, digital learning, parents and technology

10 Digital Summer Projects for Parents and Kids: Collaborate!

Posted on May 25, 2014June 20, 2015 by Marti Weston

Summertime, summertime, sum, sum, summertime.

Yup, it’s almost summer 2014!

With less frenetic schedules the summer months are a good time to learn more about the digital whirl that’s such a huge part of kids’ 21st Century lives. So when school is out, plan to do some connected world exploring and learning together, concentrating on projects that can help family members — children and their parents — figure out even more about digital life.

Below are 10 family digital project summer suggestions — all activities require collaboration — to consider for the upcoming vacation. Note: Be sure to collaborate on these projects so that adults and children make meaningful contributions.

Ten Summer Digital Projects for Families Continue reading “10 Digital Summer Projects for Parents and Kids: Collaborate!” →

21st Century Learning, 21st Century life, 21st Century teaching, parents and technology, searching

Why Word Order Matters When You Search!

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Marti Weston

The word order of a search matters in today’s connected world, so 21st Century learners of all ages should understand how search results change when a user rearranges the words. A short video on word order, uploaded by Google’s Search Anthropologist Daniel Russell – check out his Search-Research blog – teaches this lesson effectively.

Use this less-than-two-minute video, featured some months ago in a blog post at Free Technology for Teachers, as a quick and succinct teaching tool with students, parents, and other educators.

21st Century Learning, 21st Century teaching, parents and technology, spelling and editing, writing

Spell Check Your Spell Checker!

Posted on April 19, 2014March 18, 2019 by Marti Weston

Spring vacations are just about finished for 2014, so now it’s time to think about staying challenged and strong for the last few months of school.

One aspect of completing a school year is to pay special attention to writing and editing while completing assignments and projects. And an important part of editing is searching for misspelled words using two steps.

In spell-check, step one, a computer program or website, runs through a person’s prose, identifies the misspelled words, and offers the writer options for correcting, changing or leaving a word alone. These days many programs and sites spell check as a person writes, but that is no excuse for not going through the editing process.

The second, more challenging step — and perhaps the bigger responsibility — requires a writer to follow-up the spell checker, searching for errors that the automated process may have missed. Many of the remaining errors are not technically mistakes. Instead they are correctly spelled words that the writer typed by accident (or with the help of auto-word completion) or misused homonyms — accurately spelled but used incorrectly. So the spell checker missed these words. Continue reading “Spell Check Your Spell Checker!” →

21st Century Learning, 21st Century parenting, digital learning, diversity, parents and technology, reading on the web

The International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL): Changing the World One Book at a Time

Posted on April 10, 2014April 20, 2014 by Marti Weston

What if our children had instant access to a library with thousands of books from countries all over the world — a place that invited them to drop by, read, and learn about one another (without any driving)? Imagine what they could find out about the world’s cultures, celebrations, languages, differences, and also about what they have in common with all these other people and places!

That just about describes the mission of the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL), a World Wide Web destination hosted at the University of Maryland. The massive website includes digitized books in 61 languages, and it’s the largest online collection of multicultural children’s literature with a mission to the promote the love of reading AND the love of diversity. The books are beautiful filled with colorful and detailed illustrations — you almost feel like you are holding an old-fashioned book!

By clicking on the animated Read Books! icon in the middle of the ICDL home page readers, young and old, are off and reading. The multi-cultural aspect comes from interacting with books that are read and languages spoken by children in 42 other countries as well as seeing pictures by artists from around the world. Continue reading “The International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL): Changing the World One Book at a Time” →

21st Century Learning, 21st Century parenting, digital citizenship, digital footprints, digital kids, digital learning, parents and technology

How We Teach Digital Citizenship Makes a Difference

Posted on April 7, 2014March 18, 2019 by Marti Weston

Digital Citizenship Posters Become a Hallway Exhibit — Digital Citizenship Posters Become a Month Long Hallway Exhibit

When it comes to digital citizenship, we cannot just lecture or watch videos.

Everyone learns best by doing — whether it’s tying a shoe, mastering letter sounds, figuring out a science concept, learning to drive, parenting a new baby, or any other activity, including what we need to figure out on computers and digital devices. When people tell us how to do something by talking a lot, most of us can’t wait for the person to stop talking so we can try to do it ourselves.

Now consider how we have gone about teaching 21st Century children — at home and at school — about digital devices and digital world behavior. Mostly adults talk and talk, telling children, pre-adolescents, and teens about all the things that can go wrong and explaining what we don’t want them to do.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve spent way too much time talking to kids about digital life issues and not nearly enough time doing things with them. So these past few years I’ve changed the way I teach. Continue reading “How We Teach Digital Citizenship Makes a Difference” →