Promises of Piktochart

Trying out Piktochart.

This app holds promise for good use in the classroom or staff meetings. I can actually create a poster with tools just by the side to embed videos, icons, text, links and so much more.

Tried the app for a few seconds and this is what I made out of it so far, child's work but enough for baby steps:




Use Piktochart. One good visual support to learning using new media.

Facebook and Mindset of Loneliness

False sense or edited lives.  I'm out of it for now.  Deactivating my account saves me time and controversy from malicious wares entangling my life right now.

Better to focus on research and tasks I need to conclude. Dei gloriam.

Great Chinese Songs

As a way to open a new year, listening to the language of the heart and soul, before that of the mind and mouth.

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from rain,

to flowers.


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then Fireworks in the month of the God of war (wage peace)...


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Fruits

In celebrating 200 years of the Restoration of the Society of Jesus



this will be a good prelection video when talking to those who would enter the high school. it's important that students keep the end goal in mind -- after 6 years in High School, we expect a more human, reflective, other-oriented excellent person

Early Childhood & Technology Exposure

My insight to – Is It Possible to Shield My Baby From Technology?

Jeana Lee Tahnk, http://techupdates.com/go/731157#

I find this article revealing with its proposition that children under two (2) years should not be exposed to screens.  The main argument being there’s no greater benefit to real human or social-environmental interaction.

With the pervasiveness of technology, I share Ms. Tahnk’s doubt whether babies and toddlers can really be protected from technology exposure.  Indeed, as early as pregnancy, today’s generation, gen z or i-gen, are exposed early to technology.  There are two sides to this argument and one side says technology that is intelligent helps in children’s development, say the learning of language.  The opposite side would claim the authenticity of human interaction is lost and there is a seeming abandonment of the adult responsibility to look after, interact or bond with the child which is compromised by adults in the name of convenient technology replacement.

We’ll I suppose the latter argument is the extreme.  The best use of technology really is to supplement our human efforts, use it as a tool to enhance our being human instead of replacing some human aspects like interaction.

Ms. Tahnk brings up a recent study to assert protecting children under two from early exposure (more so abandon them to) screen-interactive technology.  But I do share her worry, that, it seems impossible to do.  This is a point I wish to contest as really the deciding factor here still is the role and authority of the adult.  Limits have to be set and this is done by the adult.  If conscious effort is made, then the adult can control how much time and when do we expose the kids to what type of technology.  Technology will reach and encroach into our children’s lives.  But as adults, we still have to set and enforce the limits.

According to Ms. Tahnk, Common Sense Media claims, “38% of kids under the age of two have already used a mobile device, even though the American Academy of Pediatrics discourages use of any screens for kids in the first two years of life. In addition to studies showing long-term effects on attention span, creativity, writing and communication skills”.  It does make a lot of sense that for babies, interaction with real people is so much more valuable than interacting with screens however close to real these screens recreate human experience.

My readings on Mashable (www.techupdates.com) took me to a link on, “Are Interactive Toys Interfering With Child Development?” by Travis Andrews (http://mashable.com/2014/02/25/interactive-toys-development/) where two new Apps, the Winston Show and Foo Pets are presented.  There’s a lot of fun and learning available on these two Apps, the first one responds and talks to the child that uses it, the second provides the child with a virtual pet which he can do a lot of things with like he would with a real pet (from feeding to playing), but apparently they also have their downsides, as it seems they replace the real experience of interaction either with a person or a pet, with virtual substitutes.

Travis Andrews does insist that there is no hard research to support that adverse effects result from early childhood exposure to screens but he cannot keep his own reservation when he says "that certainly doesn't mean that interacting with an iPad can approximate interacting with a human."

Apparently, it still is an ongoing study whether exposing children to media or specifically allowing them to use tablets and apps, even as these are designed for their needs, at an early age is good or harmful.  I will take the side of Ms. Tahnk though that toddlers under two should have minimal exposure to tablets with interactive apps and maximum exposure to caring humans and a concrete environment. Now as children grow older, Mr. Andrews word would be good enough, that children’s use of technology specifically tablets with interactive apps should be subject to limit and guidelines.  

As adults, we should set the goal of using technology as an effective tool to enhance our children’s learning experience, not as replacement of our roles as ultimate conductors and facilitators of learning.

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Insights on the article, "How People Learn".

There are three key findings that the research on how people learn that the article synthesizes:

1. Learners have pre-existing understandings of how the world works.
2. Competence as built on depth of understanding.
3. Metacognition ensures learning.

The illustration above summarizes my understanding of the big idea of the article.  As persons, we learn by way of the three interrelated circles of mental operation or thinking.  There is learning through teaching when it is effectively targeting the ways by which our brains or minds work.  When the school environment supports, connects or interrelates and “interlocks” effective teaching then you have a system that builds and nurtures learners for academic and holistic success.

“Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.

Teachers then have to draw out and work with the preexisting understandings that their students bring with them.” 

I totally agree.

Teaching is for learning.  I am reminded of the anecdote, I think it was from Snoopy, when Charlie Brown said “I taught this dog some tricks.  I taught it how to go fetch”. So Nancy dares and Charlie Brown throws the stick and told the dog, “Go, fetch!”.  Time passed and the dog did not return so Nancy says to Charlie Brown, “I thought you taught that dog the trick?!”.  Then Charlie Brown replies, “I said I taught it how to fetch, I didn’t say he learned it.”

To teach is one thing, to ensure learning is another.  Indeed, studies in Cognitive Psychology and the evolving science of Neuroscience tell us about how we humans learn.  I can connect this reading material readily to another book I have read, Brain Rules by Dr. Medina.  In the brain, information or learning is stored through a network of neurons or brain cells.  Different learnings have different neural networks and related learnings have interlocking neural networks.  It is through this networks that synapses or electric currents in the brain travel, and this is how the brain “knows” or processes information.  Learning is easier and lasting therefore if information taught is processed by connecting or recruiting similar neural networks for connected or related information rather than making the brain create new unrelated neural network for the information taught.  When we make it easy for the brain to function, we make it easier for us to learn therefore.

This research lays the bases for the evident practice of using diagnostic assessments, KWL-W charts and other forms of pre-assessments used in instruction.  Furthermore, the same research validates the time-tested IPP framework for planning lessons with its Context as part of preleccio.  There is indeed science behind the centuries old paradigm in Jesuit education and polishes indeed the wisdom of St. Ignatius in the Spiritual Exercises which is the anchor of the IPP.

Context in the IPP should include unscrambling of misconceptions or conceptions in order to promote authentic learning.

Metacognition is a very important habit of mind that learners have to practice and develop.  Metacognition does not come to the learner naturally.  Effective learning must raise a level of awareness of this thinking process and repetitively engage the learner into this for him to have authentic learning and not just rote. 

Research defines metacognition as the students knowledge of where s/he is in achieving the learning objectives of the lesson; it is an “internal dialogue” that the learner makes regarding his/her thinking progress in the teacher-learner process.

In a series videos in  Youtube, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH95h36NChI,  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xeHh5DnCIw) Prof. Stephen Chew of Samford University provides further clarification on what metacognition is all about and proposes to students several habits of mind that could help foster metathinking or what he calls deep processing, another name we can give to metacognition.   

The following are Prof. Chew’s strategies for metacognition:

When studying or learning content, it is helpful to guide one’s thinking process with the following questions:

1. Elaboration.  How is the concept connected to what you have previously learned?
2. Distinctiveness. What makes the concept distinct? How is the concept distinct from the other concepts being learned or studied?
3. Personal experience.  How does the concept relate to personal experience?
4. Application.  How will the concept be applied, as solution or answer to a simulated problem or to real-life conditions?

Metacognition reminds me of IPP Reflection.  When one considers Reflection as three-pronged being reflection-on-action, reflection-in-action and reflection-for-action, the scientific bases or research base of IPP is further supported.  No wonder Jesuit education only continues to reveal its beauty for the last four hundred years beginning with the Ratio Studiorum, 1599 (Plan of Studies, the first Jesuit education handbook/guide on systematic education).

Knowing the value of metacognition to authentic learning, it is challenging for me to persist on creating the spaces, time and structure for fostering reflection in all aspects of instruction on all content or subject and all activities on formation.

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travel places game, teaching geography interactively