I have been thinking about a new initiative on Teaching Kids. It is driven by several (self) discoveries.
- I am slowly discovering that I love teaching. But I constantly fight for student’s attention and keeping my teaching interesting and useful.
- A few experiments with a Social Causes Club at KCGTech convinced me that we can help kids a lot.
- I have always been interested in how people learn and how people think. It is a fascinating area of research and exploration.
- Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligence and Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms had deep influence on my thinking about Intelligence, Learning and the role of Play.
- As a parent I was clueless about the best way to help my kids learn. I just did whatever my parents did to encourage me. Now thanks to the World Wide Web and enormous resources available, we can all learn a lot more about learning to learn.
- Kids need help. So do parents, grandparents, extended families and teachers.
- Technology innovation in Tablets, Speech, Cloud Computing, Natural Language Processing enable phenomenal access. We need to find ways of leveraging technologies to make learning fun.
- I strongly resonate with Tim O’Reilly’s Work on Stuff That Matters. I think helping people learn better, will help make the world a better place.
So hear is what I am doing.
- Doing some research on Learning Apps for Kids. Here is a good starting point on a list of free learning apps.
- Checking out MIT Scratch and App Inventor
- Started a couple of student projects on learning apps
There is a lot more to do. I think I will first start with gathering and sharing information about learning tools for students, families and teachers that are available freely.
If you are interested in this area and are a parent, grandparent or a teacher, consider joining the Facebook group Resources for Teaching Kids and share your knowledge and opinions.