Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category
11 April 2012
5 Top Apps for Homeschoolers
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Wordpress.
THE 5 TOP APPS FOR HOMESCHOOLERS
By Mia Smith
A LOT OF GREAT Android and iOS apps exist to help children learn, especially homeschooled children. If you are a homeschooling parent in search of new, innovative ways to teach your child, read on to learn about some great apps you can use in in your activities.
1. 25-in-1 Free Educational Games
25-in-1 Free Educational Games is exactly what its name states. For absolutely free, you will get to sample twenty-five of the most popular games that app maker A&R Entertainment has for children. The app has an overall rating of 5/5 on Apps for Homeschooling. Kids love how fun it is, and parents love the educational value. The games range from puzzle games to spelling games, and drawing games to math games. If you are new to the world of educational apps, this will give you a nice sample of the many options available to you.
2. Alge-Bingo
Alge-Bingo is a great app for older kids, as it helps review the concepts learned in algebra. The app is very fun, and you will want to play it just as much as your kids. By solving algebraic equations, kids are able to participate in a game of Bingo. Points are awarded for correct answers and subtracted for wrong answers. There are several levels, each of which is increasingly difficult.
HP ePrint Home & Biz is a useful app that will allow you and your children to print things on your HP printer, directly from your iPod, iPad, or Android device. This is great for printing out pictures taken with the device to use in a scrapbook or other project. The app itself is free. You can save on an HP printer by using some great HP coupons that are currently available.
4. ABCKit
ABCKit is an app that helps small children learn their ABCs. This fun tool allows children to learn their ABCs in English, Spanish, and Catalan. Children listen to the ABCs, look at the ABCs, and write the ABCs themselves. This alphabet-learning tool is a great introduction to learning for small children, as well as a great introduction to the Spanish alphabet for kids of all ages. The adorable images will keep both child and parent smiling.
5. Chore Pad
Chore Pad is a great app for use in a homeschooling curriculum. The app allows you to keep track of your children’s chores, noting who has accomplished what. This app has been given the Golden App Award by Apps for Homeschooling. The app allows you to set up a system allocating points for each chore a child accomplishes, or optionally deducting points for those they did not accomplish. Then, once a child reaches a certain amount of points, they can use their points towards a reward that you have programmed into the system. Getting your kids to do their chores has never been as easy as it is with Chore Pad.
About the author:
Mia Smith resides in Florida and was a homeschooler for part of her high school years.
6 April 2012
And now for something different…
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Wordpress.
Nick Bertke aka Pogo is the 23-year old Australian genius behind a number of amazing remixes such as this one. His work has attracted over 40 million views on YouTube. You can visit his site here and see for yourself how he sequences the pieces together to create a completely new sound.
The stuff he does has been quite controversial because the footage and sound samples are obtained without permission apparently. Check out his website here.
17 February 2012
9 Essential Skills Kids Should Learn
Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Wordpress.
[A friend shared this link with me and I am sure it's a piece that will have you wondering why more parents aren't homeschooling their children. You may not agree with everything the author says, but there's a lot that strikes home. ]
9 Essential Skills Kids Should Learn
Post written by Leo Babauta.
Kids in today’s school system are not being prepared well for tomorrow’s world.
As someone who went from the corporate world and then the government world to the ever-changing online world, I know how the world of yesterday is rapidly becoming irrelevant. I was trained in the newspaper industry, where we all believed we would be relevant forever — and I now believe will go the way of the horse and buggy.
Unfortunately, I was educated in a school system that believed the world in which it existed would remain essentially the same, with minor changes in fashion. We were trained with a skill set that was based on what jobs were most in demand in the 1980s, not what might happen in the 2000s.
And that kinda makes sense, given that no one could really know what life would be like 20 years from now. Imagine the 1980s, when personal computers were still fairly young, when faxes were the cutting-edge communication technology, when the Internet as we now know it was only the dream of sci-fi writers like William Gibson.
We had no idea what the world had in store for us.
And here’s the thing: we still don’t. We never do. We have never been good at predicting the future, and so raising and educating our kids as if we have any idea what the future will hold is not the smartest notion.
How then to prepare our kids for a world that is unpredictable, unknown? By teaching them to adapt, to deal with change, to be prepared for anything by not preparing them for anything specific.
This requires an entirely different approach to child-rearing and education. It means leaving our old ideas at the door, and reinventing everything.
My drop-dead gorgeous wife Eva (yes, I’m a very lucky man) and I are among those already doing this. We homeschool our kids — more accurately, we unschool them. We are teaching them to learn on their own, without us handing knowledge down to them and testing them on that knowledge.
It is, admittedly, a wild frontier, and most of us who are experimenting with unschooling will admit that we don’t have all the answers, that there is no set of “best practices”. But we also know that we are learning along with our kids, and that not knowing can be a good thing — an opportunity to find out, without relying on established methods that might not be optimal.
I won’t go too far into methods here, as I find them to be less important than ideas. Once you have some interesting ideas to test, you can figure out an unlimited amount of methods, and so my dictating methods would be too restrictive.
Instead, let’s look at a good set of essential skills that I believe children should learn, that will best prepare them for any world of the future. I base these on what I have learned in three different industries, especially the world of online entreprenurship, online publishing, online living … and more importantly, what I have learned about learning and working and living in a world that will never stop changing.
(On to the Nine Skills – read the rest of the post here.)