The Educated Kiwi
Posts tagged education
iPhone apps my Daughter loves
Jun 20th
Recently Rylee has taken to playing a memory game on abcya.com, she does however find the multiple button mouse difficult so we were thinking about how cool a touch screen would be. I then remembered a review of some of the toddler games for the iPhone OS and to be fair I was amazed with the variety of different games available on the platform.
The touch interface is fantastic for her and I was amazed how quickly she started arranging the words and letters in the correct order. The following video is the two apps that I have brought first.
I did read some interesting comments on the review page of people saying how toddlers using an iPhone was the downfall of society but I think these people need a reality check. Rylee can play the games for about ten minutes and then we do something else. There is no need to hide her from technology when her whole life will be surrounded by it. I mean just imagine if I took the iPhone off Mrs van Dijk after only ten minutes, now thats addiction.
Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students
Oct 25th
Being a long weekend I have finished a few books and one of the ones I should have blogged about a while ago is “Doing School”. I brought this book from Amazon after having listened to the author on itunesU. The basic premise of the book is that the author followed five successful students around for a year and reports back on how they got through the academic stresses of that year.
I won’t review it here as there is plenty of reviews on the amazon page linked to below but I found it really made me think about what I wanted for education. That I am not happy to continue to teach like we have done for the past fifty years and that if we always do as we have always done we will always get what we always got, which really is no form of progress.
Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation
Sep 22nd
Thanks to Derek for this one.
As I sat in a class this morning watching students labour over a task that only a few seemed genuinely engaged in, the teacher and I discussed what their motivation was for the task. Essentially the only reason they were doing anything in this lesson was to get the grade. Now I can’t say we can avoid this all the time and my other reason for being interested in this in the first place is because Rylee has just hit two and boy can she throw a tantrum at toothbrushing time. So what is needed how can we as teachers/parents avoid the trap of rewards? The site references Alfie Kohn who seems to have quite the library of texts on the subject I will try and find one in the library and see what I can learn.
Learning to change
May 11th
I always love finding new videos that just say how I feel so thanks to Rich White I found this one.
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