SPEND SPEND SPEND

GET READY TO SPEND. Yes every dad must be ready to spend. Spend what? ..Quality time. This is the bedrock of any great relationship between a father and his kids. The forthcoming holidays provides an ample opportunity for family bonding. Plan ahead. You don't necessarily have to spend a fortune. Children flourish in homes where they feel valued and you can do this by just being there for them - be interested in their lives and what matters to them. - Sina Adelaja-Olowoake

Put On A Good Show

IT'S SHOW TIME. WOW. How exciting. As parents we are always the stars of the show and our kids are the ever watching spectators. That is why it is so important that we are mindful of our performance. Children learn via observation. Our words, actions always convey a message. If we send out the right message, it will be easier for our children to emulate the right things. Put on a good show                          - Sina Adelaja-Olowoake.

Pros and Cons of Video Games

Culled from The Sun

THE number of gamers in the UK is rising at the fastest rate ever.

Whether it’s tablets, PCs or consoles, the options for gaming have never been so plentiful.

The UK gaming industry is worth nearly £4billion a year, with the average young person clocking up 10,000 hours of gaming time by the age of 21. That means 416 solid days of gaming, or a year and seven weeks.

But are the growing numbers of gamers hurting their long-term health and destroying grey matter?

Or is gaming something doctors should be prescribing to keep cognitive skills sharp and social skills intact? Should you be picking up the controls or leaving well alone?

After a teenage gamer died last week because he spent three weeks playing Warcraft game Defense of the Ancients, we look at how gaming can influence your health

Pros

SOCIAL LIFE

WHILE the stereotype of gamers is Billy No Mates, research suggests they are more sociable than non-gamers.A study in the US looked at thousands of gamers and found they could multitask several social interactions at once.Dr Nick Taylor, who was involved in the study, said: “Gamers were often exhibiting many social behaviours at once: watching games, talking, drinking and chatting online.”

DECISION MAKING

FAST-PACED games have been found to help gamers make quicker decisions in real life.A US study split participants between the ages of 18 and 25 into two groups. One group played 50 hours of The Sims 2, the other group played 50 hours of Call Of Duty 2 and Unreal Tournament. The Call Of Duty group made decisions 25 per cent faster in a task away from the consoles and were accurate more often.

PROBLEM SOLVINGA LONG-TERM study in the Netherlands found the more teens and young people reported playing strategic and role-playing video games, the more they improved their problem solving abilities and academic grades.

SPATIAL AWARENESSTHE same study from the Netherlands found shoot-em-ups enhanced players’ abilities to think about concepts in 3D.

HELPS SURGEONS TRAINA BOSTON study of junior surgeons found those who had gamed as children and adolescents had better surgical skills and hand-eye co-ordination.

Cons. 

RISK OF ALZHEIMER’S

RESEARCH at the University of Montreal has found playing video games could increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in later life. It has been shown to affect the hippocampus part of the brain which controls memory, learning and emotion linked with Alzheimer’s and depression.

LESS AWARE OF PAIN

GAMING as a character or avatar has shown a reduced sensitivity to pain which could lead to people ignoring the body’s warning signs when they need medical help, according to a German and Australian study.

CONTRIBUTES TO VIOLENCE

STUDIES over a decade found that exposure to violent video games is a risk factor in aggression in game players. The American Psychological Association report stopped short of blaming video games.

IT ENCOURAGES OBESITY A SURVEY of 17-year-old boys found that gamers burned an average of 21 extra calories an hour but ate nearly 80 calories extra afterwards. The World Health Organisation named video games as the single biggest cause of childhood obesity.

TENDON ISSUES

NINTENDONITIS, PlayStation thumb and Wii fracture are all medical conditions which patients have presented to doctors in the UK after excessive gaming. A study found kids who game for more than two hours a day are at an increased risk of lower back pain.

Tips For Parents

NEARLY 90 per cent of children aged eight to 15 own their own games console. Here, kidsblogclub.com editor JOANNE MALLON reveals eight tips for parents ...

KEEP IT PUBLIC: You can see what they’re doing if they’re gaming in a public space.

USERNAME AND PASSWORD: Make sure you know them.

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE GAMING’S SOCIAL CURRENCY: Games such as Minecraft are the equivalent to watching the latest TV show in the Eighties. They’re social glue.

PAY ATTENTION TO RATINGS: Don’t let your child play 18-rated games, such as Grand Theft Auto V.

GROUND RULES: Agree on rules such as not downloading anything without your permission and never giving personal information to someone you’ve only met online.

DON’T PULL THE PLUG: Give a ten-minute warning before it’s time to finish.

BALANCE: If they are getting fresh air, mixing with friends in real life, and getting their homework done, then some gaming is probably OK.

WIND DOWN TIME: No gaming half an hour before bedtime lets them relax.

Signs You are Playing Too Much

WHICHEVER side of the fence you sit on when it comes to gaming, there are issues with playing too much. Score one point for each “yes” to the statements below. If your score is three or above, you may have a problem.

— Gaming makes you happy. When you stop you get angry, upset, bored or like you’re just biding time.

— When you’re supposed to be concentrating at work or school, your mind wanders to what you’ll do next when you get online to game.

— You spend more time gaming than hanging out with friends.

— When you stop gaming, you feel guilty at how much time you’ve spent doing it, but still get back online.

— If you wake up in the night, you check your game status or log on to see if anyone’s contacted you.

— You lie about how often you game and spend on each session.

— You don’t feel wholly responsible for emotions you feel when you play, be they frustration, guilt or pleasure.

— You don’t remember the last time you spent 48 hours without gaming.

— You make excuses to people so you don’t have to go out, pretending you have something else to do.

— You don’t feel right when you’re not gaming. You’ve developed habits such as biting your nails to pass the time.

— Your gaming set-up has cost you a fortune or it’s all you want for your birthdays, from gaming chairs and speakers to the latest consoles or computer upgrades.

— You find yourself thinking about gaming while simultaneously doing other tasks at school or work.

From The Sun Newspapers. 

A MUST READ FOR PARENTS. CHARACTERISTICS OF A GOOD SCHOOL

The Characteristics Of A Good School

by Terry Heick

For professional development around this idea or others you read about on TeachThought, contact us.

When a society changes, so then must its tools.

Definitions of purpose and quality must also be revised continuously. What should a school “do”? Be? How can we tell a good school from a bad one?

This really starts at the human level, but that’s a broader issue. For now, let’s consider that schools are simply pieces of larger ecologies. The most immediate ecologies they participate in are human and cultural. As pieces in (human) ecologies, when one thing changes, everything else does as well. When it rains, the streams flood, the meadows are damp, the clovers bloom, and the bees bustle. When there’s drought, things are dry, and stale, and still.

When technology changes, it impacts the kinds of things we want and need. Updates to technology change what we desire; as we desire new things, technology changes to seek to provide them. The same goes for–or should go for–education. Consider a few of the key ideas in progressive education. Mobile learning, digital citizenship, design thinking, collaboration, creativity, and on a larger scale, digital literacy,1:1, and more are skills and content bits that every student would benefit from exposure to and mastery of. As these force their way into schools and classrooms and assignments and the design thinking of teachers, this is at the cost of “the way things were.”

When these “things” are forced in with little adjustment elsewhere, the authenticity of everything dies. The ecology itself is at risk.

The Purpose Of School In An Era Of Change

What should schools teach, and how? And how do we know if we’re doing it well? These are astoundingly important questions–ones that must be answered with social needs, teacher gifts, and technology access in mind. Now, we take the opposite approach. Here’s what all students should know, now let’s figure out how we can use what we have to teach it. If we don’t see the issue in its full context, we’re settling for glimpses.

How schools are designed and what students learn–and why–must be reviewed, scrutinized, and refined as closely and with as much enthusiasm as we do the gas mileage of our cars, the downloads speeds of our phones and tablets, or the operating systems of our watches. Most modern academic standards take a body-of-knowledge approach to education. This, to me, seems to be a dated approach to learning that continues to hamper our attempts to innovate.

Why can’t education, as a system, refashion itself as aggressively as the digital technology that is causing it so much angst? The fluidity of a given curriculum should at least match the fluidity of relevant modern knowledge demands. Maybe a first step in pursuit of an innovative and modern approach to teaching and learning might be to rethink the idea of curriculum as the core of learning models?

Less is more is one way to look at it, but that’s not new–power standards have been around for years. In fact, in this era of information access, smart clouds, and worsening socioeconomic disparity, we may want to consider whether we should be teaching content at all, or rather teaching students to think, design their own learning pathways, and create and do extraordinary things that are valuable to them in their place?

Previously we’ve assumed that would be the effect–that if students could read and write and do arithmetic and compose arguments and extract the main idea and otherwise master a (now nationalized) body of knowledge, that they’d learn to think and play with complex ideas and create incredible things and understand themselves in the process. That the more sound and full their knowledge background was, the greater the likelihood that they’ll create healthy self-identities and be tolerant of divergent thinking and do good work and act locally and think globally and create a better world.

A curriculum-first school design is based on the underlying assumption that if they know this and can do this, that thiswill be the result. This hasn’t been the case. We tend to celebrate school success instead of people success. We create “good schools” that graduate scores of students with very little hope for the future. How can that possibly be? How can a school call itself “good” when it produces students that don’t know themselves, the world, or their place in it?

So then, here’s one take on a new definition for a “good school.”

The Characteristics Of A Good School

A good school will improve the community it is embedded within and serves.

A good school can adapt quickly to human needs and technology change.

A good school produces students that not only read and write, but choose to.

A good school sees itself.

A good school has diverse and compelling measures of success–measures that families and communities understand and value.

A good school is full of students that don’t just understand “much,” but rather know what’s worth understanding.

A good school knows it can’t do it all, so seeks to do what’s necessary exceptionally well.

A good school improves other schools and cultural organizations it’s connected with.

A good school is always on and never closed. (It is not a factory.)

A good school makes certain that every single student and family feels welcome and understood on equal terms.

A good school is full of students that not only ask great questions, but do so with great frequency and ferocity.

A good school changes students; students change great schools.

A good school understands the difference between broken thinking and broken implementation.

A good school speaks the language of its students.

A good school doesn’t make empty promises, create noble-but-misleading mission statements, or mislead parents and community-members with edu-jargon. It is authentic and transparent.

A good school values its teachers and administrators and parents as agents of student success.

A good school favors personalized learning over differentiated learning.

A good school teaches thought, not content.

A good school makes technology, curriculum, policies, and its other “pieces” invisible. (Ever go to a ballet and see focus on individual movements?)

A good school is disruptive of bad cultural practices. These include intolerance based on race, income, faith, and sexual preference, aliteracy, and apathy toward the environment.

A good school produces students that know themselves in their own context, one that they know and choose. This includes culture, community, language, and profession.

A good school produces students that have personal and specific hope for the future that they can articulate and believe in and share with others.

A good school produces students that can empathize, critique, protect, love, inspire, make, design, restore, and understand almost anything–and then do so as a matter of habit.

A good school will erode the societal tendency towards greed, consumerism, and hording of resources we all need.

A good school is more concerned with cultural practices than pedagogical practices–students and families than other schools or the educational status quo.

A good school helps student separate trivial knowledge from vocational knowledge from academic knowledge from applied knowledge from knowledge-as-wisdom.

A good school will experience disruption in its own patterns and practices and values because its students are creative, empowered, and connected, and cause unpredictable change themselves.

A good school will produce students that can think critically–about issues of human interest, curiosity, artistry, craft, legacy, husbandry, agriculture, and more–and then do so.

A good school will help students see themselves in terms of their historical framing, familial legacy, social context, and global connectivity.

The Characteristics Of A Good School; image attribution flickr user usarmy