Kids and tech

[jonny jeez]

If youth is wasted on the young, then they make up with it with their technology.

I don't mean just their understanding and acceptance of it but alos how best to exploit it so that it is part of their life, not a peripheral.

As i type this my youngest is busy doing her chors, working her way through cleaning the bathroom and loos...all the while she has two of her friends on face-time doing exactly the same. They are chatting, swapping hints, having a giggle at the more "icky" parts of the job and kind of motivating each other, she is doing a really good job.

The thing is, its not a gimmick to her, not a novelty...its just second nature. if she has to stay in to finish stuff, why not bring her mates in on the act.

The other night we were all driving back from south London talking about a place that I had just visited for work. I mentioned a really impressive restaurant that I couldn't recall the name of and by the time I had finished describing my meal, my eldest said "Meat Market".. and then my phone pinged, which I later found was a text of the website, menu and booking info....plus a map....all whilst she was juggling twitter, facebook and instagram

None of this is new, its all simple stuff but it amazes me how well our kids just integrate it into their lives.

My eldest has been without a phone for a few weeks in the past, (stolen at school) and she just found other ways to integrate, Tablets, PC, web cafes.

 

[classic33]

And when there's a power outage, they're lost.

 

[vernon]

The youngsters may well have mastered the skills of 'multitasking' with online applications but they still have a long way to go to

• Master the skills of critically evaluating the reliability of information obtained from the internet.
• Be aware of the potential negative consequences of sharing personal information online.
• Recognising that cutting and pasting uninterpreted and unattributed pieces of text from online sources does not count as answering a homework question in sufficient detail.

 

[Fnaar]

If youth is wasted on the young, then they make up with it with their technology.

I don't mean just their understanding and acceptance of it but alos how best to exploit it so that it is part of their life, not a peripheral.

As i type this my youngest is busy doing her chors, working her way through cleaning the bathroom and loos...all the while she has two of her friends on face-time doing exactly the same. They are chatting, swapping hints, having a giggle at the more "icky" parts of the job and kind of motivating each other, she is doing a really good job.

The thing is, its not a gimmick to her, not a novelty...its just second nature. if she has to stay in to finish stuff, why not bring her mates in on the act.

The other night we were all driving back from south London talking about a place that I had just visited for work. I mentioned a really impressive restaurant that I couldn't recall the name of and by the time I had finished describing my meal, my eldest said "Meat Market".. and then my phone pinged, which I later found was a text of the website, menu and booking info....plus a map....all whilst she was juggling twitter, facebook and instagram

None of this is new, its all simple stuff but it amazes me how well our kids just integrate it into their lives.

My eldest has been without a phone for a few weeks in the past, (stolen at school) and she just found other ways to integrate, Tablets, PC, web cafes.

The youngsters may well have mastered the skills of 'multitasking' with online applications but they still have a long way to go to

• Master the skills of critically evaluating the reliability of information obtained from the internet.
• Be aware of the potential negative consequences of sharing personal information online.
• Recognising that cutting and pasting uninterpreted and unattributed pieces of text from online sources does not count as answering a homework question in sufficient detail.

Both really good points. It is now very much a part of their lives, but Vernon's points are very true indeed.
Thankfully, with regard to homework and uni essays, I think my tribe have got the message...

 

[IDMark2]

Well, what I think is

Recognising that cutting and pasting uninterpreted and unattributed pieces of text from online sources does not count as answering a homework question in sufficient detail.

 

[Fnaar]

We had some friends stay recently, whose son has Down's Syndrome. He has some pretty severe learning difficulties, and although 4 yrs old, has a mental age significantly lower.
But within 2 minutes of playing with my phone, he'd found the only game on there, and was playing it.

(He also turned the phone's language to Russian, but I won't mention that)

 

[jonny jeez]

The youngsters may well have mastered the skills of 'multitasking' with online applications but they still have a long way to go to

• Master the skills of critically evaluating the reliability of information obtained from the internet.
• Be aware of the potential negative consequences of sharing personal information online.
• Recognising that cutting and pasting uninterpreted and unattributed pieces of text from online sources does not count as answering a homework question in sufficient detail.

True enough but this" integration" isn't all about gaining " trivia" from the internet. My girls also meet their friends by using their GPS positioning to locate them when they go out, they know exactly what time to leave the house for the next bus...or what time the next bus is due to arrive at the stop, they can book a taxi in advance (something at my age I still never manage to master) with what seems like a one qlick "uber" app, They translate (rarely) but efficiently, book tickets, order food, share homework resource...and more.

its really mind blowing how much they use all of these features...fluently, no Inherently, compared to me who, whilst aware of the tech, still do all of that stuff in a very much more "old fashioned" way...I still use tech mind, just not as simply as they do.

To give you an example....

-Me at a concert last night, texting my mates to confirm that they are in all Bar one, ...it took a few texts and eventually a phone call to all meet up.

-My eldest, walks into Valerie Patisserie in Mayfair to meet 4 friends on her way home from work, who she knows are already there, while she knows the other two are walking from Piccadilly...same result, just more efficient.

 

[StuAff]

The youngsters may well have mastered the skills of 'multitasking' with online applications but they still have a long way to go to

• Master the skills of critically evaluating the reliability of information obtained from the internet.
• Be aware of the potential negative consequences of sharing personal information online.
• Recognising that cutting and pasting uninterpreted and unattributed pieces of text from online sources does not count as answering a homework question in sufficient detail.

Back in the last century, fellow pupils used to try much the same thing with excerpts from books. Reading something, and quoting it, not understanding it.

 

[Cuchilo]

Ive just been round to a friends house to build a half pipe to try and get her kids away from computer ( games ) and outside on their skate boards . The boys where interested in helping out so i left them with the task of doing up all the screw on the final boards with a yankee screwdriver

 

[marknotgeorge]

It's quite simple really. Kids are hardwired to learn stuff. Tech is just another thing to learn.

 

[Dave 123]

It was good when they used to shove them up chimneys

 

[vernon]

The worst case of unsanctioned plagiarism that I came across as a moderator was a set of A-Level Information Technology modules that had been submitted as grade A and grade B scripts. Out of the eighteen scripts that I marked only one used original material to document the building of a computer. The other seventeen used the same Internet source with the images cropped and manipulated in different ways, the text being minimally altered and the sequence altered. It was blatantly obvious that the work was not the students' own - the writing style was far too mature, far too similar and perfectly punctuated. Seventeen scripts were marked down from A and B grades to U.

It was a gut wrenching experience. The students will have been expecting their work to have been accurately marked by their tutor and I suspect that the catastrophic downgrading will have affected their gaining admission to the universities of their choice. Try as I might I could not create a scenario that legitimised the submission of the work with the allocated grades.