I was wondering if anyone could help me out. I’m looking for:
Active forums or message boards about:
-parenting -teaching -elementary education -digital media learning -kids and technology Do any of you visit or know of any forums like this? If you do, I’d really appreciate you sending me a link! Thanks in advance!
Check out these interesting articles on kids and technology!
—Parents will enjoy these iPhone and iPad apps (Parents.com)
—Mom’s Facebook Community Helps Diagnose Her Ailing Son (Mommyish.com)
—New regulations for food, beverage advertising toward children (Healthkey.com)
—Using touch screens and apps to treat autism (mercurynews.com)
—The Internet Is Making Your Kids Think Differently, Not Less (Mommyish.com)
—Teaching Angry Birds In School (neatorama.com)
—Infographic Shows Top and Bottom States for Science Education (livescience.com)
For the latest on kids and technology, visit the Spark blog!
Story Boxes are popping up all over town—in museums, libraries, and schools. To date, about 130 Story Box units have been produced, and that’s just the beginning. So what exactly are Story Boxes, and what do they mean for children in Pittsburgh?
A Story Box is a 21” x 12” x 4” portable device containing images with “hot spots” that, when pressed, play related audio clips. For example, the “My Favorite Animal” Story Box features photographs of young children with illustrated embellishments to make them look like different animals. By pressing on a child’s photo, the listener can hear audio clips of that child roaring like a tiger, describing a zebra’s fur, or remembering the time they met a unicorn on the beach.
Each Story Box focuses on a specific theme. Story Boxes produced to date have included topics such as:
The devices are funded by Spark and produced by The Saturday Light Brigade. The Saturday Light Brigade (SLB for short) began in 1978 as a weekly public radio program focusing on family and community life. Today, SLB has grown into a non-profit with a permanent home in The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. In addition to broadcasting live for six hours every Saturday, SLB also offers technical and self-expression workshops for children and youth from 8 to 18 years of age.
In 2008, SLB began working with the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon on a project called HearMe. HearMe and Story Boxes have a lot in common as they both focus on collecting and distributing children’s stories. In many ways, these projects take the original intent of the SLB radio show and mobilize it. Host and Founder Larry Berger explains:
“When SLB began in 1978, it was reasonable for us to use radio to inform and delight an often-unexpecting audience with children’s stories and ideas. We designed Story Box technology with hopes of achieving this goal in today’s fragmented media environment and fast-paced world. As mass media shrinks and user-directed content increases, we wanted a simple way to reach people and, frankly, tempt them to listen to voices of children.”
South Korea recently announced plans to spend $2 billion (2.2 trillion won) on digital textbooks and supportive cloud computing systems for the nation’s schools by 2015. In addition to the content provided by their paper counterparts, the digital textbooks boast a variety of features to augment the learning experience. For one, they can utilize audio, video, and other multimedia instead of just text and images. They can also provide a much wider breadth of resources, allowing students to browse and download textbooks on demand. They even have the capability to host online classes, giving absent children the ability to make up classes they might have missed. It comes as no surprise that South Korea is the first to propose the switch. After all, the country was the first to provide high-speed internet access to all of its primary and secondary schools. In many schools, tablets are already an integral part of learning.
According to a ministry official: “It will be up to schools to decide which digital textbooks to choose for students in what year in what subject. We don’t expect the shift to digital textbooks to be difficult as students today are very accustomed to the digital environment.”
Free tablets will even be made available to low-income families to make sure all children receive the same benefits. While the cost may seem steep and the goals ambitious, the potential impact of this investment could signal a sea change, not only in Korean schools, but for the future of education around the world.
Read more about technology and education on http://www.sproutfund.org/spark/blog/
