Many Parents Letting Kids Use Their Tablets for Schoolwork

According to a recently released Nielsen study:

Approximately 78 percent of parents with tablets admitted they let their kids under the age of 11 use their tablets at home.

More than half of parents (54 percent) who let their kids use their tablets at home replied that their children used tablets for educational purposes.

Out of this pool, some of the most popular activities were reading books (42 percent), taking notes (40 percent), and finishing homework (30 percent).

The top activity was actually “searching the Internet” with 51 percent, which could be left up to some interpretation, but the other activities certainly have merit.

71 percent of people who used tablets for educational use affirmed they are interested in using the devices for accessing textbooks as well.

It’s a chicken-and-egg situation of what needs to happen first: more parents buying tablets for educational reasons, or content providers delivering digital materials first?

Inspired by Zuck, Obama Supports Kids Learning Tech

From the PC Mag article –

In order to have patented technology, however, you have to have technology smarts. When Fried later asked the president if he thinks high schools should have a computer programming requirement similar to a foreign language requirement, Obama said he “thinks it makes sense.”

Ultimately, Obama said he wants to make sure the high school experience is “relevant.” Vocational schools “got a bad rap,” he said, because the perception was that people were being fast tracked into blue-collar jobs.

But Obama pointed to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who told the president that he’d taught himself to code, primarily because he was interested in gaming. There’s a whole generation of kids who could benefit from getting a head start on similar high-tech learning. It “engages kids,” Obama said.

“Given how pervasive computers and the Internet is now, I want to make sure they know how to actually produce stuff using computers and not simply consume stuff,” he said.

 

 

Coming Soon…NY Times for Kids?

Get ‘em while they’re young, right? It’s not such a far-fetched idea. Time and Sports Illustrated both have for-kids versions, while the Huffington Post launched a vertical called Huffpost High School (later rebranded Huffpost Teen) in 2011.

A Powerful Tablet for Children

Saw this in Sunday’s Boston Globe (note to Globe – the search function on your website stinks) – a review of Ematic’s FunTab Pro tablet for kids.  From the piece:

“You may need to use ice cream and jelly bean bribes to get Ematic’s FunTab Pro out of your child’s hands.  This 7-inch Android 4.0 child’s tablet has enough power to load programs before little minds wander, two cameras for taking photos or capturing videos, and hundreds of fun and educational apps and programs.  The FunTab Pro has an ergonomic grip for little hands, and comes with a selection of blue, pink, and red faceplates.  $149.99 at Walmart.”

Boston Globe Putting iPads in Public Schools

The Boston Globe announced that a digital pilot program that will put 75 iPads into public school classrooms in Boston and Stoneham, Mass.

According to Robert Saurer, the Globe’s director of customer experience and innovation, “We believe that digital kids turn into digital adults.  We want to provide easy, portable access not only to our content, but to the greater world of content on the web — deployed in the classroom daily, streamed live, as the kids are learning.”

Wicked ‘smaht’ move by the Globe and the wave of the future, for sure.  Better to have kids reading the Globe, or any newspaper, on an iPad rather than no newspapers at all.

Kids Reading More eBooks

The percent of U.S. kids who have read an eBook has almost doubled since 2010, from 46% vs. 25%, according to a new report from Scholastic, which interviewed kids aged 6-17 and their parents.

I imagine that number will keep going up and eventually overtake the amount of print books kids read.  What do you think?

Eleven Year-Old Launches Social Network for Kids

Grom Social is for kids aged 16 and under.  According to its Twitter page, it’s “A website designed for kids by kids giving them a safe & fun environment to interact in.”

Like other social networks you can use the site to connect and share with friends. In addition, it also includes lots of free content like video games, sports and entertainment news, and tips on how to stay healthy. It even includes tutors to help kids out with school and safety tips for kids who are staying home alone from school. Parents can get involved and create a parental account, available to people over the age of 16, to check up on their kids’ activity on the site.

Best Tablets for Kids

A friend sent along this link to Shelly Palmer’s “Best Tablets for Kids.”  I know, I know…the holidays are a distant memory.  Better late than never.

BTW, Palmer ranks the LeapPad 2 number one…

Sourcebooks Put You in the Story

Sourcebooks recently introduced an app that allows parents to alter books to include a child’s name throughout the copy.

The app, Put Me in the Story, takes best-selling Sourcebooks titles like “Dream Big Little Pig,” an inspirational book by the figure-skating Olympian Kristi Yamaguchi, and “The Night Night Book,” a rhyming board book, and essentially enables mom or dad the ability to add a child as a character throughout.

Has anyone tried this yet?  Curious to hear.

How to Train Your Robot

Thanks to my man Josh Salvi for calling my attention to this DrTechniko post on “How to Train Your Robot.”  Pretty cool stuff.  Check it out.

I especially agree with this statement from the blog:

“Learning how to program is going to be the most useful new skill we can teach our kids today. More than ever our lives depend on how smart we are when we instruct computers. They hold our personal data and they make decisions for us. They communicate for us and they are gradually becoming an extension of our brains. If we don’t learn programming as part of our childhood, we will never evolve. As the famous futurist, Ray Kurzweil, put it “The only second language you should worry about your kids learning is programming.”

Amen brothers and sisters.