Flickr: Shlala

Our gadgets are our saviors and our worst enemies. As parents, we have tools to reign in our children’s time spent online, but it may be harder to impose restrictions on ourselves.

As I’ve mentioned before, the tools are not the culprits. It’s what we, as busy-as-can-be, super-productive, highly efficient humans, do with them.

To that end, Lifehacker recently provided a characteristically useful set of instructions on how to avoid burning out on all the gadgetry around us.

Some highlights below.

• On access:

Train yourself to just keep the phone in your pocket more often. Find other ways to check the time. Decide to check your email a little less. If it gets problematic, don’t take the phone with you or turn it off when you go out at night. Technology exists to make things easier, but if you’re making your life more difficult by interacting with your devices, too often it ends up being more of a problem.

• On multitasking:

If you want to form good habits with your technology, consider interacting with one device at a time to avoid multitasking and the poor prioritization of digital interaction over real interaction.

• On getting organized:

Email is one of the toughest things to get under control and there are more solutions out there than you could ever really try.

Advice that’s easy to put to work, immediately. As soon as you put your smart-phone down.

By Leslie Rule

We first got wind of the iPad in January 2010, released April 3, 2010 and by June 30 (end of Apple’s fiscal  quarter), 3.43 million had been sold. Yes, it’s the latest fad.

As a device, it is amazing. For education, it is an innovation of sea-change magnitude. So how does this amazing, game-changing faddish device become the future of education? Let’s start at the beginning.

1) How do you learn best?

Because the iPad is a multimedia, tactile machine, it offers learners multiple ways to explore, engage, and make meaning—ways that traditional books and standard lessons just can’t. In today’s classrooms, “learning styles” is an accepted pedagogical consideration. Often cited are the four styles in the VARK model: Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing, and Kinesthetic. (Disclaimer: Much controversy surrounds both the  Learning Styles research and literature, but as an educator with 15 years experience, I’m going to buy in to it, to the extent that common-sense and experience justify the theory).

2) What kinds of books are being developed for the iPad that justify the “future-of-education” claim?

Let’s start looking at what a  book would be if we used digital technology to redesign it as a learning experience. Pillars of the Earth, a very popular piece of historic fiction by Ken Follet (I read it and quite liked it) is one of many books that have been made into a stand-alone iPad app. Here’s the shameless and unabashedly commercial marketing website. Watch the video in the middle of the screen and imagine what 21st century teaching and learning could be if we used this model. Think “multimedia ebook” instead of “textbook.” (To note: Penguin Publishing is owned by Pearson Publishing, one of the largest textbook publishers.)

Multimedia ebooks are also inherently cross-curricular because they aren’t linear. Pillars of the Earth, invites the user to deeply engage with history, mathematics (what is architecture but the creative, practical, and beautiful use of geometry), music, philosophy, science, political science, and geography — exactly because it is multimedia. We can read about music, or we can listen to music, or we can do both as best suits our learning styles and goals.

3) What novel would you start with?

For me: To Kill a Mockingbird. The novel in digital form, peppered with well-chosen scenes from the movie, historic video and still images, primary documents, contextual documentaries (Eyes on the Prize), themed period movies (Remember the Titans), maps illustrating demographic and geographical convergence…all a click away. And imagine if the student project was to create your own. That would be learning.

There are so many ways and devices that will walk us into the experience of learning. It’s time we stopped with the talk and started with the walk.

Some other examples:

From the YouTube description: An interview and behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the amazing new ebook The Elements: A Visual Exploration. Theodore Gray tells you the why and how of this best-selling new iPad book.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHiEqf5wb3g&feature=youtube_gdata_playe

Toy Story from Disney Digital

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq7xKXuN6i8&feature=related

The Cat in the Hat

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnZvAq93tbQ&feature=related

Alice in Wonderland and the accelerometer in action (and on steroids)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gew68Qj5kxw&feature=related

Flickr: SashaW

From the Fort Morgan Times:

Fort Morgan School District students will have a chance to use the Wii video game system for some physical education classes starting soon.

Not every student can play soccer or kickball during physical education due to their disabilities, and the Wii system is helpful for disabled kids to learn eye-hand coordination, balance and using both sides of their bodies, said Tammy Johnson, director of special education, during Monday`s meeting of the Fort Morgan Board of Education.

http://vimeo.com/15142335

Flickr: Pleasance

What place do video games have in a classroom? Aren’t they just a distracting waste of time for kids who should be memorizing multipication tables? Sara Corbett eloquently answers these questions in her illuminating article in the New York Times, which aptly sums up some of the controversies around bringing technology into the education system.

My favorite passage in the piece, which will appear in Sunday’s New York Times magazine:

What if teachers gave up the vestiges of their educational past, threw away the worksheets, burned the canon and reconfigured the foundation upon which a century of learning has been built? What if we blurred the lines between academic subjects and reimagined the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room or a child’s bedroom or even a child’s pocket, circa 2010 — if, in other words, the slipstream of broadband and always-on technology that fuels our world became the source and organizing principle of our children’s learning?

Specifically, the article’s about Quest to Learn, a small school in New York City that’s been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, among others, and its mission is to teach students through interaction with digital media and games.

For example, whereas in a traditional school students would learn algebra, history, and English in separate classes with different teachers, kids at Quest to Learn blend the subjects into one class and collaborate on building a game based on those very subjects. And they use digital media as their tools: podcasts, video editing software, and blogs, among others.

From the article:

Students have been called upon to balance the budget and brainstorm business ideas for an imaginary community called Creepytown, for example, and to design architectural blueprints for a village of bumbling little creatures called the Troggles.

Corbett uses Quest to Learn to provide the big-picture conundrum surround this topic: Although kids are highly proficient at navigating the digital world, most schools do not incorporate the technology kids use outside the confines of the campus.

The issues are layered and complex. As Corbett points out …

Even the first family has sent mixed messages: President Obama has criticized video games for displacing family time and physical activity — urging parents, for example, to “turn off the TV, put away the video games and read to your child” — but he has also encouraged the development of new games to bolster the all-important science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills in young Americans.

… but the article does an excellent job of using research and real-life examples to illustrate the current thinking about the subject.

For students of all ages who’ll be creating important content that needs to be protected and saved at all cost — and for that matter, for any of us who want to protect our data — Crunchgear suggests a few different option for data storage, from servers that exist in the ether to tangible boxes that can hold a veritable museum’s worth of information.