Learning Apps for Kids

We know kids love smart phones, ipads, and like.  I hear that two year-olds can navigate better than their parents sometimes.  While we still believe in limited technology time, here are some learning apps for little ones that will make the time spent on the devices a little more worthwhile.

TheRockfather.com collected some great things from PBS Kids HERE including:

Super Why ABC Adventures: Alphabet app for iPhone/iPod touch, your child can do just that while playing a comprehensive collection of five interactive literacy games that help build strategies and skills to master the alphabet! With each game hosted by a different Super Reader, your child will be introduced to uppercase and lowercase letters and their names, the order of the alphabet, common letter sounds and writing letters in fun and exciting ways!

Also make classic children’s books such as Arthur’s Teacher Trouble come alive with Wanderful’s Story Books App HERE. Each book is bought separately, and there are several to choose from. They also have a free sampler to try it out. Search Wanderful Storybooks on the App Store.

I used to LOVE the Reading Rainbow TV show as a kid and now LaVar Burton has a RR App to keep today’s kids loving books as well. Click HERE to learn more.

Technapex has collected other great apps HERE which includes:

Math Ninja: While there are many math apps available for kids, Math Ninja has been one of the most consistently popular. Users play as a ninja who has to face off against the evil Tomato San and his army of robots, with levels solved through various math problems from mental arithmetic to selecting the correct prime number. This app includes simple comprehension exercises. The app doesn’t require a significant amount of mathematical knowledge, but is a useful way of reinforcing the basics.

Let us know how you like these or recommend your favorites!

Online Videos Aid Mastery Learning

While I still think putting pencil to paper is crucial while working out math problems, I heartily agree with some of the ideas espoused by the online Khan Academy’s founder, Salman Khan.

From MIT Technology Review:

In much of the developed world, Khan writes, schools use a top-down teaching model first developed in Prussia, a Germanic kingdom known for “stiff whiskers, stiff hats, and stiff way of marching in lockstep.” Students must march ahead even if they haven’t understood what came before. Eventually, some stumble and tune out.

Khan’s big idea is that using online technology for lessons, quizzes, and constant assessment will create an affordable way to implement a different teaching ideal known as “mastery learning.” Everyone advances at his or her own pace. Don’t try algebra until you know your arithmetic. Spend less time in lectures and more in hands-on problem solving.

Khan Academy has over 3,000 free videos where you can get some quick help on anything from math to history to medicare. The idea is the student can rewind and rewatch the video as many times as needed to fully understand and go at his own pace instead of only learning from a live teacher trying to keep 30 students at the same place during a lecture. It’s a great resource if you need more instruction or refreshing on a topic.

While at Gideon we believe a live person will generally give a better explanation as he can respond to student questions and working out problems on paper leads to faster mastery (see here and here), a good video goes a long way when your teacher cannot be reached. Watching some Khan Academy videos inspired us to make our own which are designed to be back-up support for students in the Gideon program working through the booklets. The center instructor’s in-person guidance and a student’s pencil to paper practice are still our primary ways of attaining mastery, but the videos are useful if you need to see the steps animated or hear the sounds – such as in phonics.

They are found by visiting our Youtube channel or by scanning the QR code on the front of a booklet using a smart phone. We’ve completed most of the lower math and reading levels already!

Equivalent Fractions:

Phonics:

Why Johnny Can’t Add Without a Calculator

A new trend is the use of a calculator for EVERYTHING.  While we demand mastery at Gideon which requires memorization of basic math facts, many students (from high performing school districts) we see are still counting (or even multiplying!) on their fingers.  There is an added problem that with teaching Connected Mathematics which doesn’t see a need to teach long division of larger numbers as it can be done on a calculator and CM sees it as a waste of classroom time.

While doing some education classes at a major Texas university over ten years ago to be able to be certified to teach secondary math in here, I was repeatedly told to incorporate technology into my lessons and show ways it made the lesson more interesting to students.  (Is the goal to be interesting or effective?)  I’m fairly old school and didn’t see the need for the graphing calculators most of the time, and luckily the school where I student taught (and later taught for 1 year) agreed with me.  However, when I taught students fresh out of the local middle school, they were very upset with me when I did not allow calculators on quizzes or tests.  Many could not tell me 6 x 8 in Algebra I as ninth graders.

When Longfellow Middle School in Falls Church, Va., recently renovated its classrooms, Vern Williams, who might be the best math teacher in the country, had to fight to keep his blackboard. The school was putting in new “interactive whiteboards” in every room, part of a broader effort to increase the use of technology in education. That might sound like a welcome change. But this effort, part of a nationwide trend, is undermining American education, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. It is beginning to do to our educational system what the transformation to industrial agriculture has done to our food system over the past half century: efficiently produce a deluge of cheap, empty calories.

I went to see Williams because he was famous when I was in middle school 20 years ago, at a different school in the same county. Longfellow’s teams have been state champions for 24 of the last 29 years in MathCounts, a competition for middle schoolers. Williams was the only actual teacher on a 17-member National Mathematics Advisory Panel that reported to President Bush in 2008.

Williams doesn’t just prefer his old chalkboard to the high-tech version. His kids learn from textbooks that are decades old—not because they can’t afford new ones, but because Williams and a handful of his like-minded colleagues know the old ones are better. The school’s parent-teacher association buys them from used bookstores because the county won’t pay for them (despite the plentiful money for technology). His preferred algebra book, he says, is “in-your-face algebra. They give amazing outstanding examples. They teach the lessons.”

Technology is designed to make our lives easier, but there are some skills that should be learned anyway. Let’s say fractions is difficult for you, and the calculator will give you the answer easily.  Should you never bother to learn how to add fractions?  This is similar to saying that since I don’t like to cook and there are plenty of restaurants, I shouldn’t bother to learn how to cook.  There may be situations you need to be prepared for – such taking the GMAT where a calculator isn’t allowed in the quantitative section or in my cooking case, needing to save money by eating at home. continues:

Math and science can be hard to learn—and that’s OK. The proper job of a teacher is not to make it easy, but to guide students through the difficulty by getting them to practice and persevere.  “Some of the best basketball players on Earth will stand at that foul line and shoot foul shots for hours and be bored out of their minds,” says Williams. Math students, too, need to practice foul shots: adding fractions, factoring polynomials. And whether or not the students are bright, “once they buy into the idea that hard work leads to cool results,” Williams says, you can work with them.

 

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https://youtu.be/mk_JiwIjzXU