Flickr: Andrew Beeston

With two weeks of holiday break stretched out ahead, here are some fun ways to keep kids occupied and engaged, as collected over time on MindShift.

1. DIVE INTO MINECRAFT.

Simply put, Minecraft is a game that lets you build worlds out of blocks. But Minecraft’s visual simplicity belies what is a completely open-ended and therefore terrifically complex world. And the best of that world: it’s up to the player to design. Minecraft is what’s known as a “sandbox” game, giving players almost complete freedom to build within it. While many video games are focused on certain goals — level up, save the princess, destroy the aliens, for example — Minecraft has no clear-cut missions, at least not in that way. Players in Minecraft must scavenge for resources in order to build things — mining for stone to build buildings, mining for coal to build fire. One of the only limitations in-game is time — the sun sets each evening and when it’s dark, spiders and skeletons come out and can attack the characters.

2. MAKE A FILM.

The next Steven Spielberg might emerge from a summer movie-making project. Kids can exercise their writing, creativity, organization, and artistic skills by making their own movies, just as any director does: writing scripts, choosing actors, practicing lines, not to mention actually filming and editing. For those who own an Apple computer, iMovie makes the process very simple. YouTube also offers free editing, and you can find other editing software online.

3. START A DIY PROJECT.

Refrigerators and fireplace mantles might still be covered with children’s projects, but more and more, those projects are finding a home online. That’s just one of the purposes for DIY.org, a site that allows kids to upload photos of their projects and share it with their friends, family, and the public. Check out all the amazing kid-made projects from across the world.

4. LEARN TO PROGRAM.

It’s hard to argue with the importance of teaching students how to use computers — how to turn on, log on, search the Web, and use applications. These skills are absolutely necessary for students’ academic success as well as for their future job prospects. Here are five tools to introduce kids to programming. 

5. BECOME A CITIZEN SCIENTIST.

Citizen science takes scientific inquiry and research out of the lab (and out of the sole purview of scientists and researchers) and puts it in the hand of those without formal scientific training — “citizens,” volunteers, and, yes, students. There are a number of ways that students can engage in citizen science projects over the summer, whether they’re spotting animals or identifying plants. Here are a few suggested apps and websites.

6. AUTHOR A WRITING PROJECT.

Budding writers can start a week-long writing project focused on a specific theme. Write about animal skeletons and types of clouds; or invent TV cartoon characters based on exotic animals, or spend the week writing about magic or food or chocolate. Re-imagine your favorite fairytales with your chosen theme. Write and draw short stories, poems, or illustrations inspired by the subject you’ve chosen. Turn the storytelling process upside down by using pictures and math equations to tell a story, or describe a classroom through a teacher’s eyes, or describe the days of the week as if they were people. Find hundreds of writing prompts on this Tumblr blog.

Flickr: Christopher Frier Brown

By Mark Memmott

Developers of smartphone and tablet apps aimed at children have done little in the past year to give parents “the information they need to determine what data is being collected from their children, how it is being shared, or who will have access to it,” the Federal Trade Commission reports.

“Our study shows that kids’ apps siphon an alarming amount of information from mobile devices without disclosing this fact to parents,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz says in a statement released by the commission. “All of the companies in the mobile app space, especially the gatekeepers of the app stores, need to do a better job. We’ll do another survey in the future and we will expect to see improvement.”

The FTC’s report is posted here. In it, the commission’s staff:

“Strongly urges the mobile app industry to develop and implement ‘best practices’ to protect privacy, including those recommended in the recent FTC Privacy Report: (1) incorporating privacy protections into the design of mobile products and services (‘privacy by design’); (2) offering parents easy-to-understand choices about the data collection and sharing through kids’ apps; and (3) providing greater transparency about how data is collected, used, and shared through kids’ apps. These standards should be developed expeditiously to ensure that consumers have confidence in the growing mobile apps marketplace.”

According to the FTC, among its more troubling findings is that many children’s apps “shared certain information with third parties — such as device ID, geolocation, or phone number — without disclosing that fact to parents. Further, a number of apps contained interactive features — such as advertising, the ability to make in-app purchases, and links to social media – without disclosing these features to parents prior to download.”

FTC on Children’s Apps:

Listen to the full story here.

TonyTone/Ian Hill/Photologue_NP/

By Aran Levasseur

Shakespeare is going digital.

Notre Dame professor Elliott Visconsi has co-created a new app for the iPad called The Tempest that he says helps accelerate student learning by allowing them to develop deeper comprehension in less time than solitary reading. At the heart of the app is a social network that encourages students to communicate their interpretations and collaborate with others.

“We’ve found that most people learn best when they are in the role of author, creator or collaborator, when they are teaching others,” Visconsi said.

We spoke with Visconsi about transforming Shakespeare for the 21st century and why the intensely social experience of the app is what, in essence, the humanities have always been about. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation.

Q&A

The Tempest app is described as transforming Shakespeare for the 21st century. How does it do that? And why do you think Shakespeare needs to be transformed for the 21st century?

Elliot Visconsi: We are trying to lower the entry cost of difficult content like Shakespeare by adding in great tools and features that allow readers from all backgrounds to grapple with, appreciate, and love a beautiful and moving play like “The Tempest.” We are not rewriting or modernizing the text; we are putting the play at the center of a social network, a distributed learning network in which the play is an invitation into a sustained, living experience.

The play is the center of a generative ecosystem that includes all of our tools and content, but also the presence of others both past and present (other readers, faculty commentators, performers, artists, fellow students and teachers). Rather than the individual reader working privately and alone in solitude with the play, we see the mobile reading experience as becoming intensely social as the way that the humanities have always been social and have always depended on exchange and collaboration.

It sounds like you are bringing Shakespeare to the stage that many people find themselves on today, which is a social media platform of some kind. And as a result, you are encouraging people to interact with not just Shakespeare, but with each other’s thoughts and interpretations of Shakespeare.

Visconsi: Absolutely. We’ve found that most people learn best when they are in the role of author, creator or collaborator, when they are teaching others. We put our readers in the driver’s seat; we want you as a reader to love and understand Shakespeare, and we feel the best way to do that is to give you the tools to take ownership of the experience and to speak to others, collaborate with others, create and share new commentaries on the play, rather than simply receiving or consuming a play that may be difficult because it’s relatively remote historically.

You alluded to some of the features within the app, but could you be more specific about which features you’ve found that enhance students’ appreciation and comprehension of Shakespeare?

Visconsi; We’ve found that the audio tools (the main track supplemented by the alternative takes — which we call AudioPlus) are immediately available to all of our readers. Whether those readers are seventh graders, professional actors, or teachers and students, the audio is a great success — more so, I think, than video would be. That tool makes it apparent how crucial performance is to understanding, especially in that it makes obvious the choices of the director or the actor or the writer in creating emphasis. This may be an obvious point for actors and teachers, but every encounter with the play relies on a set of choices about where to lie emphasis on how to interpret an act, a gesture or a phrase; once you reveal that fact to readers, they are now in the director’s role.

The reader can then think about a third way of creating emphasis, and using the iPad, record it and share with classmates. MyPath is very well-received; it allows teachers and students to cut and arrange and share the play effortlessly. You can see a part, create a selection of key passages, and write about them or perform them. All of that content is sharable, and the reader owns it. We’ve also had people use MyPath as a way of preparing students for class, by selecting a few passages for study and sending them to their students.

The faculty commentaries have also been quite popular. We’ve gotten a lot of positive responses to those short interpretive takes — both from the writers and readers, and our team of experts is full of leading scholars from top universities worldwide. We also have one scholar who has written in Mandarin. Faculty love writing these short riffs on the play. They aren’t meant to replace the classroom but begin conversations, introduce key ideas and such, in the way that we might do for an introductory Shakespeare class or a lecture for parents’ weekend.

I was interested when you were saying that the humanities have always been social and about collaboration and communication. So it seems you are modernizing the humanities lineage with the communication and collaboration tools of our time. Could you tell us how this app, in essence, is what the humanities as always been about?

Visconsi: Absolutely. [Tempest co-creator and Bryn Mawr College professor] Katherine Rowe and I both have a deep commitment to the liberal arts model in undergraduate education and to the humanities in general. We wanted the app to replicate longstanding humanist practices. The humanities has always been about the robust exchange of intellectual ideas across space and time. Whether that takes the form of a dynamic “republic of letters,” one philosopher or poet rewriting a precursor, or an interpretive argument between scholarly peers about Prospero’s “revels” speech, humanist practices celebrate collaborative exchange, argument, and interpretive depth. Innovation happens, we think not as the efforts of a solitary genius writing or working in a vacuum but rather in communities, teams and networks.

Minds are located within communities, and communities may be physical or virtual. We believe that understanding, comprehension and innovation happens in the context of other minds. Sometimes you access other minds through their writings; sometimes you access them in real time. And we wanted to make that premise the heart of our app. We wanted collaboration, interpretive depth, and the exchange of ideas to be the very foundation of the reading experience, and not just an overlay. We supply a great audio performance and supplement that with recordings of alternative takes on key passages, to really clarify how a performer’s emphasis changes understanding. That’s also why we have 10 faculty commentators instead of one. There is no single authoritative view we hope to promote; we provide several high-quality prompts to nudge our readers forward. And then we add curricular ideas, pedagogical exercises, and great sharing tools. As a reader, you hear version A and version B — now the app prompts you to create version C. We try to put the reader into the position of the creator as often as possible.

With these authoring tools, you are providing an environment in which people are encouraged to produce and not just passively consume. So what kind of impact have these social tools had on student engagement, comprehension and appreciation of “The Tempest?”

Visconsi: Students and teachers get further into the play faster, with deeper comprehension than by solitary reading. Along the lines of the flipped classroom metaphor, we have seen students working at a higher level in class, demonstrating deeper interpretive sophistication, and handling textual details with much more ease. They are prepared to get into complex philosophical issues sooner. They come to class better prepared, asking more strenuous questions. By getting deeper into the play and sharing notes and reading together, students are more confident. And they feel they can look to their peers in moments when they need guidance. So the app is expanding the footprint of the class. The classroom is becoming ubiquitous. Meaningful conversation can happen anytime.

We’ve found that our readers have a better intuitive understanding of the role of performance in a work of dramatic literature, and that they have expressed a lot of pleasure in discovering Shakespeare in this format. The responses have been uniformly positive; it’s thrilling to hear back from readers all over the world who are using the app and enjoying it immensely for school or pleasure.

If at the heart of understanding Shakespeare, or any text for that matter, is not only decoding the text, but also being able to communicate your understanding in a collaborative social environment, then it seems your app is providing a kind of cross-training platform for exercising the range of intellectual muscles that are foundational for a humanities education.

Visconsi: I think that is a great metaphor, Aran! It really is a cross-training platform for Shakespeare. Love that. As developers, we didn’t want to merely replicate print or put a PDF on the iPad or make it easier for students to consume Shakespeare on the iPad. Our tools are designed to generate ideas, start conversations, facilitate sharing — students and readers of all kinds should be creators of content, authors and collaborators. They should learn from and teach each other. They should argue with each other, and weigh competing interpretations. I think that is a really important part of humanist practice. If you don’t like an idea, position or interpretation, you are invited to make a more persuasive case, a more compelling interpretation. That’s what we do in the humanities. We didn’t want this to be the authoritative version of the play to be admired or read in solitude; we want it to be a generative version of the play, one which sparks innovation and creates new knowledge.

Is there anything next after The Tempest? Is there anything else in the pipeline?

Elliot Visconsi

Visconsi: We are developing four additional plays using the same template as The Tempest for iPad: These are “Othello,” “Macbeth,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and “Romeo and Juliet.” We have most of the content already in the can. Forty-four or so university faculty and high school teachers have written for us and enjoyed it a lot. We are also building a product line working with a national theater company to mirror and extend a live performance. One of our great aspirations as developers is to share what we do in the humanities with a much larger audience than we’re used to. A “MOOC” on modern and contemporary poetry taught by Al Filreis at Penn and hosted by Coursera, for instance, had 34,000 students registered when it went live back in early September. So there’s an appetite out there, a huge hunger for quality content. As humanists, I don’t think we’ve done a good job communicating what we do to that broader audience.

The Tempest for iPad is one way of trying to solve the audience problem for the humanities. We know the audience is there, and we hope to reach as many readers as we can through this and our subsequent apps. We have readers in 24 countries worldwide, and we are getting reviewed in leading venues such as the Times Literary Supplement. It’s exciting, and has been wonderful to share news of the project.

Any miscellaneous thoughts or comments?

Visconsi: We believe that The Tempest for iPad and our subsequent Shakespeare apps aren’t replacing other traditional media forms or cannibalizing market share from printed books. Some change is inevitable, and there will be some rearranging of ratios, but we are not out to destroy print or replace the book.

We believe that print and web-based publishing are durable and important, but we think that mobile apps are especially well-suited to creating an intensely collaborative and richly textured reading experience.

Aran Levasseur is the Academic Technology Coordinator at San Francisco University High School. You can follow him @fusionjones on Twitter.

This post originally appeared on MediaShift, which covers the intersection of media and technology. Follow @PBSMediaShift for Twitter updates, or join us on Facebook.

Erin Scott

By Jennifer Carey

A good rule of thumb for any classroom use of cellphones: the lesson/activity must be engaging as well as productive. You don’t want technology for the sake of technology (and students aren’t going to be intrinsically fascinated with a device they use routinely when they’re outside of school). If the students don’t enjoy what they’re doing, they will be more tempted to use their phones inappropriately.

Here are some ideas:

IN-CLASS POLLING/QUIZZING. Educators like using the program called Poll Everywhere. It’s free for audiences up to 40, and allows you to create quiz questions for which students text in their answers. No expensive clicker systems to buy, set up, and maintain. If students register their cellphone numbers (a requirement in my class) you can even track their answers for impromptu quizzes or review.

IN-CLASS BACK-CHANNELING: Backchanneling refers to the use of networks & social media to maintain an online, real-time conversation alongside spoken remarks. For example, if you attend a keynote presentation at a conference, you’ll often find that some listeners in the audience are using their mobile devices to comment to other audience members about things the speaker is saying, while the speaker is saying them.

Backchanneling can be a great way to give quiet students a voice, to introduce additional facts and insights during a lesson, or simply to encourage “conversation” during lecture or group readings when you don’t want to actually interrupt the presentation.

While Twitter is probably the most popular medium for backchanneling news and entertainment events (using #hashtags to create an instant network), teachers may want a more controllable platform than Twitter provides. Teachers can set up a variety of  a private backchannel using free webtools, like Today’s Meet, which allows individuals to create temporary rooms to host backchannel discussions.

Poll Everywhere can also be used for this purpose. Plus, it allows you to moderate comments and prohibits any anonymous contributions.

IN-CLASS READINGS AND HANDOUTS. Smartphones can also be used productively in the classroom as eReaders for books and handouts. You can place all student handouts into DropBox folders (see “Dropbox A Multi-Tool for Educators”). Students can access Dropbox space and open reference material without printing it up or asking for a new copy during class assignments.

Of course, for traditional reading materials (textbooks and paperbacks), you can use mobile apps like Kindle eReader, Nook App, iBooks, or Google’s Play Books (just to name a few). Many of them host free content and some allow you to load content of your own. This is a great way to save money on book purchases and photocopies. Using these apps, students can even highlight and annotate.

ORGANIZING RESEARCH. “Camera scanners,”which capture information using the phone’s built-in camera, allows students to take pictures of documents (even books with those bendy pages), crop them, and then enhance them for ready viewing. You can create notebooks of documents (if you are copying sections of a book or article) and then store them on the device or export them (as a photo image or PDF) to Google Docs, DropBox, Evernote, and more. It’s a great tool for you or your students to organize research materials. One of the best apps for this purpose isGenius Scan+  – available for iOS, Android, and Windows based phones.

Evernote is another great application that students can use to organize their notes and images, take voice notes, write notes by hand, gather web clippings, sort emails, and more. You can put them into pre-categorized folders (class, project, theme, etc) as well as give them “tags” which makes them easy to search and sort later.

Most people can grasp the power of having Google in their pocket, but few recognize that the mobile version of Google is much more than a web browser. One of the cool features is its ability to perform searches using images. This feature, called Google Goggles, is a creative way to search the Internet for image-based content (watch the video). See how it was used in a creative field trip experiment at the local museum.

These mobile Google capabilities offer a great way for students to explore material on the fly, using a variety of media. Any content, images, etc. that they find can be sent to a Google Drive account.

Jennifer Carey teaches at Trinity Valley School in Ft. Worth, Texas and blogs at Indiana Jen. A version of this post appeared on Voices in the Learning Revolution.

Reading Rainbow app

YouTube clips. Texting. Twitter. Facebook status updates.

The prevalence of short-attention-span media — easily scanned or consumed — has led to much hand-wringing over how students will develop that lifelong love of reading perceived to be so critical to lifelong learning.

One answer (in addition to “it’s not as bad as you think,” as a recent Pew Research Center study might be summarized) may be in adapting the function to the form. Which is to say to put real, and sometimes classic, children’s books on the latest digital devices via apps and the web.

That’s the tack several tech-oriented companies are taking with both fiction and non-fiction. And while the customer for each effort differs — ranging from parents to teachers to librarians — the emphasis is remarkably similar: instilling the love of reading and books early, even if there isn’t a physical book.

A handful of recent examples for this revenge of the retro:

LIVING BOOKS.  Your first reaction may be that “Living Books” sounds familiar. And it should.  A startup, Wanderful, is bringing back titles in the much-loved series that software company Broderbund originally produced two decades ago, at the dawn of the CD-ROM age.

No longer restricted to physical discs or desktop computers underpowered for multimedia, the updated titles are returning as $5 iPad iOS apps (and eligible for Apple’s Volume Purchase Program for Education), with plans to add Android versions after the first of the year. These newest Living Books are being driven by leaders of the original team, including former Broderbund CTO Mickey W. Mantle (now CEO) and Living Books creator Mark Schlichting.

The five titles available now are Arthur’s Teacher Trouble, The Tortoise and the Hare, Little Monster at School, Harry and the Haunted House and most recently, The Berenstein Bears Get in a Fight. Each includes multiple languages, interactive features for multi-touch devices and refreshed art work for higher-resolution displays that didn’t exist when cathode ray tubes reigned supreme. An

educator-focused Classroom Activities Guide is available for $2.99 as an in-app purchase, tying each storybook to reading, arts, math, social studies and other subjects with alignment to Common Core State Standards.

Wanderful’s Bill Hensley plans to have a free “sampler” app before the holidays (with a sample page of each title) and a second Arthur title, Arthur’s Birthday, is slated for January.

READING RAINBOW. Earlier this year at the SXSWedu education technology conference, keynote speaker LeVar Burton (known, depending on one’s generation, as Kunta Kinte of Roots, Geordi La Forge of Star Trek: The Next Generation or the host of PBS’ long-running Reading Rainbow) announced to wild educator applause the return of Reading Rainbow as an iPad app. Burton’s RRKidz venture subsequently launched the app in June with 150 books, now up to 175 titles, sporting voice-overs, “light animations” and activities.

Designed for kids ages 3-9, the iPad app is free and includes one book; others are part of a $10/month subscription (or $30 for six months). A companion website gives parents updates on the amount of time kids spend reading and recommends new stories based on their interests. Publishers involved include Little, Brown, Holiday House and Peachtree Publishers. RRKIdz says popular titles, so far, include A Child’s Calendar by John Updike and the I See I Learn series by Stuart J. Murphy. Android? Expect it in the first quarter of 2013.

But those are books by the piece. What about books delivered by the digital pallet to school libraries and entire buildings?

MYON READER. Capstone Digital has put more than 3,000 digital book titles on its web- and iPad- friendly myOn Reader enhanced eBook platform and expects to reach 4,000 by the end of the year. Each book is tied to Lexile measures for reading difficulty and ability level and has an embedded assessment. Most feature narration (for reading aloud), highlighting, a dictionary and other scaffolds which can be turned on or off as needed.

And in an era driven by recommendation engines, myOn suggests more reading based on student interests. Books come from more than two dozen publishers such as Hachette, DK, Highlights and Capstone itself, ranging in reading level from early childhood to high school.

Because of the education customer focus, myOn Reader has an annual school subscription model. Capstone estimates more than 4.25 million books have been read since it launched in January 2011.

BRAIN HIVE. A different, pay-as-you go approach comes from Brain Hive. It’s a free web-based platform that works with Mac and Windows computers, tablets with browsers and through a dedicated iPad app. Brain Hive has more than 3,000 basic — and non-interactive — non-fiction and fiction eBooks for which school libraries pay $1 per student checkout. Books in the collection do offer bookmarking and note-taking capabilities.

Familiar books include those in the Boxcar Children series, Franklin’s Thanksgiving by Paulette Bourgeois and others from major publishers such as Random House. While the names may resonate, questions were raised when this was shown at June’s ISTE conference about what happens when checkouts exceed a school library budget. The answer? Titles become “temporarily unavailable,” just as they might if a physical library ran out of copies.

So does this mean many of today’s young children will never heft a physical tome? Unlikely. But they will come to understand that a book is more than its container, whether it’s paper or plastic.

Frank Catalano is a consultant, author and veteran analyst of digital education and consumer technologies. He tweets @FrankCatalano, consults as Intrinsic Strategy, and writes a column for GeekWire. Full disclosure: he advised Capstone Digital on its plans for myON Reader in late 2010, but will never disclose his Lexile measure.

Flickr: GoodNCrazy

By Bill Chappell

Thanksgiving is Thursday, and that means more than 43 million Americans will be on the road, driving to family gatherings. For many parents, the crowded roads can bring another challenge: Keeping a 9-year-old entertained along the way. And sometimes, DVDs are not enough. These days, kids love to tinker with smartphones and tablets, as well.

With that in mind, NPR’s Renee Montagne spoke with an actual 9-year-old, Jane Frauenfelder, and her father, Mark. Together, they host the podcast Apps for Kids.

Here’s a list of apps the Frauenfelders recommend for traveling kids, in an interview airing on Morning Edition Wednesday:

Story Dice — Making up stories is a time-honored way to pass the time on the road. This app gives you the basic elements of a story, in the form of simple images on dice (a face, a king’s crown, a rocket, etc.). Players then string the images together.

“What we like to do,” Mark says, “is take turns, each of us telling a story that uses all of those elements. And then we, as a family, vote on the best one.”

Jane describes a typical story: “One day, there was a kid on a school bus, and he was carrying a soccer ball. Then it flew out of the school bus, so he had to chase it. Then he met a magical unicorn that gave him a piece of toast.”

“That’s the short version,” Mark says.

The game is similar to Rory’s Story Cubes, which comes in both app and physical form.

Mobbles — Virtual pets are released weekly in this game, in which digital animals have their own quirks and needs.

“You gotta take care of your Mobble every day,” Jane says. “Wash it, play with it, clean it. And it’s actually a lot of work.”

NPR

Jane explains what she sees as the game’s most fun feature: “You can catch Mobbles if you’re on the road somewhere. Like, maybe you’re in Arizona. Then you can get like, a Mobble from that zone.”

Postcard on the Run — Share images of your trip the old-fashioned way. “You make a postcard, and then you can actually send it to somebody, in the mail,” Jane says. “Like, they make a real copy of it.”

The cards can include a finger-written note, a map — or even a scent, in a feature called “Smell Mail.”

If that’s not enough to fill your little one’s time on the road, here are some bonus apps the Frauenfelders recommend trying:

Cobypic — A coloring book for the digital age: kids fill in drawings with their own colors, chosen from photos taken on a smartphone’s camera. The drawings range from simple images to iconic works of art.

“It’s kind of like an online coloring book,” Jane says. “But it’s more fun.”

Waze — Sometimes diversions just won’t do, and all a child (and a parent) wants is to get to their destination. Blending GPS maps with real-time tips from other drivers, Waze provides advice that can help you avoid traffic snarls, or find the cheapest nearby gas station.

Another feature allows friends to share their current location — and lets Waze’s estimated 30 million users chat with one another on the road. Typical topics include speed cameras and lane closures.

You can learn more about Jane and her father’s podcast, Apps for Kids, on Boing Boing.

This post originally appeared on NPR.