What's Become Clear

Take a second and look at the list below. What do each of these have in common?

Cell phones
Smart phones
iPod
Chat
Text messaging
Twitter
Facebook
E-mail

Perhaps you said these were all digital. Or that they are all customized and individualized. You may have said these are all things that kids use. Or you may have said these are all things that are used in businesses today as  tools. All of those would have been correct, but they weren’t what I was looking for.

The thing I’ve noticed that they all have in common is that each of these is banned in the vast majority of our schools. Wouldn’t you think that the tools that are used daily in our kids lives, and are also used as business tools, would be utilized equally effectively in our schools?

When I talk to faculties of high schools they are adamant that these items should never be used in school. And in fact, they identified them as huge distractions to student learning. My question to the staff members is, “who is responsible for teaching kids to write multipage research papers?” Typically, several hands go up. Usually they are members of the social studies department, or the English department, or the science department, or a combination of all of these.

But when I asked who was responsible for teaching kids the appropriate use of the items in the list there is  never hand raised. My next question then is which of these would be most often used by our students in the real world, a multipage research paper or the items in the list above? Obviously, the items in the list will be used regularly by most, if not all, of our kids in the real world as students, and adults. They will be used both in their personal life, in their professional lives.

So why do schools refuse to incorporate these items not only asked curriculum content, but also as tools to learn the existing content? What do you think? Leave me a comment below and we’ll talk about it.

My colleagues and I  are involved in one of the most interesting and exciting projects we’ve ever done at ESSDACK, and yet at the same time one of the scariest we’ve ever  done at ESSDACK. We are creating a website, My Kids Turn, that is designed to assist parents in helping their kids learn things that are important to them to succeed in school, and hopefully life.

We will have webcasts that help parents of primary school kids, three and four-year-olds, learn to read and work mathematically. We’ll have the same kind of webcasts designed for kids that are in primary grades, kindergarten, first grade, and second grade.

We’ll have another series of webcast for parents to understand what it means for their kids to grow up digital. To have the kinds of electronic tools that, as kids, the parents didn’t have. It’s very scary for parents to see their kids have access to technology and tools that they the parents didn’t have as kids and may not even understand as an adult.

Related to  the digital tools we will also have a series of webcasts on video gaming. For many parents this is an even scarier proposition than the digital tools. At least the parents use digital tools in their everyday life, so they have some understanding of them. But many parents have never even played the kinds of video games that  kids love to play today. So these webcasts are designed to help parents make decisions about which games to allow their kids to play, how long to allow them to play, and what the educational benefits are of the games.

So stay tuned for mykidsturn.com that will be launched in late January or early February 2010 with these and many other webcast for parents. If you have questions or comments please leave them below, I’d love to correspond with you.