I love this essay by Syambra Moitozo about what it was like to have Steve Wozniak teach her computer class in 1995. Some great quotes from Woz:

“It was less important to me what you teach, and more important to motivate people by making things as fun as you can,”

“Why not let young students go in the directions they want to? Let them go off and do what they like to do and don’t force them to be going at the same speed as somebody else. Most of school might as well just be daycare anyway. If people have something in their heart, you shouldn’t slow them down...I liked being a super geek, but I definitely never pushed my values on other people.”

This is an interesting article. If Daniel Kahneman's 'dual-process' theory is correct, it could be a useful way to think about technology education (and maybe even education in general). Maybe what teachers should be consciously focusing on is helping students develop their ability to access and use 'system 2' vs. the much easier and instinctual leap to 'system 1'. Of course, schools already do this--we wouldn't be able to teach students without doing it. Making it an explicit goal though might be helpful in guiding the curriculum.

This is a cool idea. They have selected 100 innovative year-long projects in Finnish schools and an additional 100 projects in schools around the world. From the website: "All insights and best practices will be documented, packaged and shared with the world for free. In Fall 2017 we will launch our digital service HundrED Share, organize seminars in various cities across the world, release a book and five short documentaries."

Currently, you can view all the projects they have selected in Finland and follow the progress. They are open for submissions for the global 100 projects.

The organization in charge of the initiative is called SCOOL. They also have some other interesting products/projects:

• Campus - Seminars to help teachers learn about innovation and change around the world 
• Dreamdo Schools - A platform for creating/sharing project-based learning ideas 
• Triplet - A service to 'transform news into educational material overnight'

I like this essay On the Wildness of Children a lot. I'm not sure 'unschooling' is the answer but the more time I spend working in schools the more I am convinced that a greater proportion of the school day should be devoted to free play and exploration. I can imagine a school that would strike a better balance between traditional instruction and the state Carol Black calls 'open attention' without completely doing away with the concept/institution of school.

I agree pretty strongly with the viewpoint of this article. When I contrast the computer science education I received in public High School (writing programs in BASIC and FORTRAN to solve real problems) vs. what I see a lot of now (drag and drop block programming environments like Scratch, Mindstorms, iOS apps, etc.) I wonder whether kids are really gaining an understanding of basic computer science and logical principles.

I recently gave a presentation to parents at our school titled Children in a Digital World. The focus was current research on screen time, educational technology, and helping kids stay safe online. Here is the slideshow in PDF format. Some of the slides will not be that informative without the context of what I said when presenting but I'm posting it here in case it could be useful to anybody working on a similar presentation.



https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4oFdBU0Ve2iNk1vblVXVUFZeUk/view?usp=sharing

Follow up: This is a good article on the same subject:

http://digg.com/2016/smartphone-toddler-studies