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Is your child hooked to Youtube?

YouTube, is my favorite destination for anything and everything under the sun. Be it entertainment, information, general awareness or history, it has got everything. I am a fan, period!

Now since I am a parent, I also see lot of content at Youtube which is useful for my kid. In fact I encourage my child to use Youtube. Over the past few months I have seen my daughter get pretty comfortable with it and now she is like a 'child-pro' when it comes to using Youtube. However, I have also observed several things with Youtube which don't make me too happy. I definitely wish for a Kid's version of Youtube.

I would recommend other parents to watch out for the below mentioned things if they expose their children to the treasure trove called Youtube!

 1. Inappropriate content

For every video meant for children, Youtube has tonnes of videos which are not suitable for them. Children are a curious lot, which makes them particularly receptive to lot of unwanted content. Constant Parents' supervision is the only full proof way of avoiding inappropriate content, like Porn or Violence.

 2. Interlinked videos

Although search results & video recommendations are generally in kids genre, handful of recommendations end up being from irrelevant genres as well. Again in case of unsupervised usage, all the child needs is one bad recommendation to get sucked into the vast world of undesired videos.

 3. Content quality

Often kids are watching cartoons and we as parents feel Ok. But there are numerous instances when the content of these cartoons is questionable. It confuses kids. This one time, my daughter started getting too attracted towards Monsters (commonly referred in the US for pre-school teachings), she would try to draw them everywhere. Her teacher called it out and asked me to check what she was getting exposed to. It wasnt a big incidence, but lack of active monitoring could end up confusing your kid about what is right-wrong, good-bad etc.

 4. When to stop?

Even, if the kids are watching just the right content, once they start liking it on Youtube they want to see it all the time. Before you realize it becomes part of their routine. No food unless you give them Youtube etc. Because Youtube doesn't tell them - we are done, it is time to stop.

 5. Ads and the journey outside youtube

Ads on Youtube are also pretty troublesome. Unless the parent is sitting next to the kid, they are extremely prone to getting lost in the world of internet after clicking on an ad. What follows is a series of hap-hazard clicks and reinitiating the Youtube app on tablet. Although my daughter learned how to cancel the ad popups and she is also pretty ok to restart the app, but still ads are nuisance we could do without when it comes to children.  

Youtube is a necessity in today's digital world and has numerous benefits. However, I would love to see a kid's version of Youtube (by Youtube or some other education company) coming out sometime soon to address these points.

For all its goodness, YouTube has some obvious flaws when it comes to young kids. This is where our specialized application fills the gap.

- Prasad Ajinkya - Parent, blogger, gamer, coder & startup guy.

Enter Pedron... 

It is designed to ensure kids get access to only select videos (& other content) that are appropriate for them to view. Parents can also set a time limit, to manage child's digital play time. As the videos are being carefully selected keeping the age of the kids in mind, the chances of all the possibilities stated above is completely eliminated. Besides Videos child can also play educational games within Pedron and it auto adjusts itself depending on child's performance and interests.

Try it now. Both, you and your child will love it.

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Pedron explained in 5 pictures

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Pedron

Personalized Learning Peaceful Parenting

As parents we want our children to scale the heights of professional success, not only that, deep down we desire them to become world class. We try to provide them with the best facilities  resources at our disposable and hope they will make it big some day. Like the pyramid below, we desire our kids to climb up the ladder and reach the top to be successful. Which obviously means we desire them to be better than all their peers. 

However, we are totally oblivious to the fact that we are asking our kids to learn absolutely the same thing as every other kid in the class or every other kid in the same grade across the country! In this  case, rising up the chain becomes a question of individual brilliance vs. purposeful thought out training.  

Wouldn't it be better to have a trainer who would be with your kid all the time. Not as a class teacher but as a playful companion at home. One who would actually teach your kid by disguising it as play time. One who would know his/her understanding & interest areas instantly and would ensure modification of the learning plan in real time.  

Pedron App is such a companion

What is Pedron?

Pedron is a free Mobile App which acts as a personal learning companion for your kid at home. It allows your kid to have fun by playing games and watching videos. While it monitors your child's progress, it automatically adjusts the presented content to ensure maximum understanding and deep focus on areas of interest for your kid.

What does Pedron do?

Plays games with kids

Shows videos  to kids

Personalizes content for each kid

Shares child's performance report with parents and teachers

Who can use Pedron?

Pedron mobile app is designed for children at Pre-Primary level. It will be extended to serve students at the Primary level  as well by the end of 2016.

Why should Parent's encourage use of Pedron?

Personalized learning is a luxury Parents didn't have when they were growing up. It is a reality today. We must encourage our children to reap the benefits. 

Pedron helps parents identify the following for their kids

Strength areas

Improvement areas

Comparative performance vs kids in similar age group

Secure content - Most of the parents allow their kids to view videos through Youtube. This is generally supervised by parents else kids are prone to consuming content not meant for them. With Pedron this problem gets addressed as well, since all the content is designed specifically for kids.

Pedron will be launching kid safe mode very soon. Through which kids wont be able to navigate out of the secure Pedron environment unless the parent allows it.

Pedron is not

A substitute to classroom teaching, it is a supplementary fun learning tool

Designed for senior classes yet

How to get Pedron? 

Visit Totsmart site or click on the links below

Apple App Store

Google Play Store

Special inaugural offer

Now enjoy all the premium content in Pedron, free of cost till 29th Feb, 2016. Dowload Pedron and use Promo code - START99

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Is your 5 yr old already as smart as you were at 7?

If your answer is ‘yes’, then you are not alone. Lot of other parents also have similar notions. It is a common discussion topic among parents these days, a topic that makes them feel proud and good about their child.

It’s not an anecdote anymore, solid empirical data is coming out in favor of such beliefs. A recent article published at nprEd quotes results from a study done in the US and quantifies how students understanding of concepts is improving with age. University of Virginia scholars have published this using US Department of Education’s interviews of Teachers who work with kindergarten & grade One students.

Authors claim, learning is becoming faster, students’ understanding is higher on average and concepts that are being taught in schools are more complex vs 12 years ago. Not only this, teaching methodologies which are being followed in classrooms today would be considered ‘too advanced’ for kindergarten students 12 years ago.

While on one hand studies like these make parents feel proud, on the other hand they also raise questions around ‘the need’ to speed up learning like this. Especially since countries like Finland which are widely believed to have the best schools & Edu system on the planet, do the opposite. That is, focus on experiential learning and no or less homework for first few years in school.

Original article as it got published, is produced here

Why Kindergarten Is The New First Grade

“What are some of the things that the monsters like to eat in this story?” teacher Marisa McGee asks a trio of girls sitting at her table.

McGee teaches kindergarten at Walker Jones Elementary in Washington, D.C. Today’s lesson: a close reading of the book What Do Monsters Eat?

“They like to eat cake,” says one girl.

“I noticed you answered in a complete sentence,” McGee says. “Can you tell me something else?”

“Stinky socks!”

McGee follows with a line you might not expect in a kindergarten class: “Can you show me the page where you found that?”

Textual evidence. Complete sentences. Welcome to kindergarten in 2016. It’s not quite what McGee, 29, says she was expecting when she started.

“When I came into kindergarten, down from first grade, I was like: Yes! What can I order for dramatic play?” McGee says. “And I was told: Kindergartners don’t do dramatic play anymore.”

If you have young kids in school, or talk with teachers of young children, you’ve likely heard the refrain — that something’s changed in the early grades. Schools seem to expect more of their youngest students academically, while giving them less time to spend in self-directed and creative play.

A big new study provides the first national, empirical data to back up the anecdotes. University of Virginia researchers Daphna Bassok, Scott Latham and Anna Rorem analyzed the U.S. Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which includes a nationally representative annual sample of roughly 2,500 teachers of kindergarten and first grade who answer detailed questions. Their answers can tell us a lot about what they believe and expect of their students and what they actually do in their classrooms.

The authors chose to compare teachers’ responses from two years, 1998 and 2010. Why 1998? Because the federal No Child Left Behind law hadn’t yet changed the school landscape with its annual tests and emphasis on the achievement gap.

With the caveat that this is a sample, not a comprehensive survey, here’s what they found. Among the differences:

In 2010, prekindergarten prep was expected. One-third more teachers believed that students should know the alphabet and how to hold a pencil before beginning kindergarten.

Everyone should read. In 1998, 31 percent of teachers believed their students should learn to read during the kindergarten year. That figure jumped to 80 percent by 2010.

More testing. In 2010, 73 percent of kindergartners took some kind of standardized test. One-third took tests at least once a month. In 1998, they didn’t even ask kindergarten teachers that question. But the first-grade teachers in 1998 reported giving far fewer tests than the kindergarten teachers did in 2010.

Less music and art. The percentage of teachers who reported offering music every day in kindergarten dropped by half, from 34 percent to 16 percent. Daily art dropped from 27 to 11 percent.

Bye, bye brontosaurus. “We saw notable drops in teachers saying they covered science topics like dinosaurs and outer space, which kids this age find really engaging,” says Bassok, the study’s lead author.

Less “center time.” There were large, double-digit decreases in the percentage of teachers who said their classrooms had areas for dress-up, a water or sand table, an art area or a science/nature area.

Less choice. And teachers who offered at least an hour a day of student-driven activities dropped from 54 to 40 percent. At the same time, whole-class, teacher-led instruction rose along with the use of textbooks and worksheets.

Not all playtime is trending down, though. Perhaps because of national anti-obesity campaigns, daily recess is actually up by 9 points, and PE has held steady.

Bassok was surprised by her results. “We went into the study seeing a lot of anecdotal evidence” about the ratcheting up of expectations in kindergarten, she says. “I thought part of this was a nostalgia for what we imagined kindergarten may have been. It’s pretty amazing to me that, over a 12-year period, we see such drastic changes in teachers reporting what they expect and how they spend their time.”

But what do these findings mean? And are they inherently bad?

Sonja Santelises, vice president for K-12 policy and practice at the Education Trust, which focuses on efforts to reduce the achievement gap, says rising expectations are a good thing, though “rigid instruction” is not.

“The report clearly raises important questions about how we are teaching our youngest learners,” Santelises says. “But we need to be careful that we’re not conflating the challenge of high-quality, engaging instruction and the actual target of learning to read.”

Bassok agrees. “The changes that seem potentially troubling are more around how kids are learning, not what kids should be learning,” she says. “There are classrooms that are very hands-on and allow kids to explore and also have terrific focus on math and are language-rich. Those things don’t need to be at odds at all.”

It’s easy to make this a story about teachers’ responses to high-stakes testing. Especially when you consider that, for every one of these indicators, the trend was even stronger in high-poverty classrooms and in schools with more nonwhite children — schools that no doubt felt accountability pressure under NCLB.

However, the authors caution that there are lots of factors at play here. Since 1998, the number of children attending public preschool has jumped dramatically. There’s been an even bigger leap in students attending full-day versus half-day kindergarten, which gives teachers more time to cover every subject. Parents also appear to be spending more time reading to kids and otherwise introducing language and math. In short, it’s possible teachers’ academic expectations have risen, at least in part, because more kids are coming to kindergarten better prepared.

Also, kindergartners are older than they used to be: 1 in 5 is 6 years old, in part due to the practice of “redshirting.”

It should be said: The data in this study are five years old. It doesn’t capture changes that may have taken place in schools since the adoption of the Common Core, for example. Kindergarten changed dramatically in just over a decade; as policies continue to shift, so too could practice. For now, it’s less pretend time and more reading for the kids at Walker Jones Elementary.

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10 Parent behaviors around their child’s mobile usage

Ever wondered if it is ok to have your child use a mobile or a tablet? Have you had parents or teachers advising against it? Have you tried to keep your Child away from Mobile? Did it work for you? Were you sure it was the right thing to do?

Most of us with children have been in similar situations, often grappling with similar questions. Not only in India but across the Globe parents face similar dilemma. Given the ever increasing abundance of digital interfaces around us, it is impractical to keep children away from Mobile screens till they have grown up a little. It is not impossible, but sure is difficult. After all they are called “Digital Natives” for a reason.

Last year, The Asian Parent Insights did a study in South East Asia on the Mobile Device Usage Among Young Kids. The study’s key findings are given below.

You can judge for yourself if you are like other parents when it comes to putting in House Rules around mobile usage, or if you are being too strict or too lenient. 

98% of parents in Southeast Asia allow children to use devices. The majority of parents show little hesitation in allowing their children to use a device, despite common perception that prolonged device use may have a negative influence on children. Across SEA, 67% of children use a parent-owned device. At 71%, Singapore has the highest number of children aged 3- to 8-years-old using a parent owned device.

The primary motivation of parents for allowing the usage is to supplement child’s education. Parents highly value their children’s education, as proven by the 80% who give their children access to devices predominantly for educational purposes. 55% of the parents also allow the usage so as to keep the child busy, a behaviour also exhibited in lot of other countries.

Children use devices mainly for gaming, videos and educational apps. As previously noted, parents allow their children to use devices with the primary intention of supplementing education. However, as the data reveals, there is a disparity between what parents want their children to use the devices for and what children actually use them for. Children aged 3- to 5-years-old use devices for gaming (25% vs 29%) and education (26% vs 27%) at similar levels. The older segment of children aged 6- to 8-years-old use these devices more for gaming (29% vs 37%) and less for education (20% vs 22%).

Children are most likely to use a device for over 1 hour per sitting. The usage time of children increases with age: only 30% of 3- to 5-year-olds use devices for more than an hour in each sitting compared to 50% of 6- to 8-year-olds.

Parents’ top three concerns on their children’s use of devices are, exposure to inappropriate content, impact on health and addiction to devices.

Devices are used by children mostly at home and least used in school. Children’s device usage is mostly at home (99%) and the least in school (17%). Usage in school is low due to several reasons. Firstly, most children use their parents’ devices which are not available at school. Secondly, mobile/online education is at a nascent stage globally and its inclusion into the school curriculum in Asia will take some time.

Parents are the primary users who police their children’s device usage. Although most parents allow device usage by their children, 77% of them personally monitor what their children consume and view on their devices.

Parents would like devices to include control mechanisms to help them monitor their children’s device usage. Parents are concerned about what their children view on their devices and ensuring that there is no risk of exposing them to inappropriate content. Given this, content filtering and other ways of exercising parental control (e.g. being able to control time of device usage) are very important for all parents. 94% of SEA parents wish their device included parental control mechanisms.

Setting a time limit, preventing in-app purchases and monitoring usage progress are the most desired features in a device by parents.

30% of parents are willing to pay for children’s apps.While these parents have financial concerns related to their children’s device usage, especially with regard to in-app purchases, they are still willing to pay for an app as long as it provides superior educational value and allows the flexibility of parental control. This reflects the main motivation for why parents allow their kids to use devices: to supplement their education. 

Image source

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65% OF TODAY’S GRADE SCHOOL KIDS WILL END UP AT JOBS THAT HAVEN’T BEEN INVENTED YET

The things kids learn MUST BE relevant & portable. We must emphasize on learning practical stuff vs rote learning designed to produce assembly line workers during the Industrial Revolution or subsequently the office clerks. 

Coz, Times...they are changing! 

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Kids - attentive while playing and sleeping while studying

SUPER Talk by Gabe Zichermann @TedxKids

He makes some great comments

1. How come a kid seems perfectly fine while playing a video game but parents complain of lack of attention while he is asked to study?

2. May be its not that he has A.D.D, ((Attention deficit disorder) but just that what is being taught is too slow for him.

3. What if something which is normal for us – sipping a hot cup of tea on a Sunday afternoon reading a book, would never be done by our kids when they grow up? What if their mind is not tuned to see & do things the way we do? What if they are too fast? Human IQ is increasing every year and next generation is much smarter!

4. There are things which kids enjoy and they also learn while doing those. Why don’t we leverage those to improve our methods of teaching? Games!

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Embrace the change or die!

The title may be a little too strong, but with every passing day we are inching closer to it. If we don’t embrace the change, flush out the redundant, be relevant – it’s going to collapse. The Education System that is.

A recent article in Guardian UK by well known Professor Sugata Mitra titled “Advent of Google means we must rethink our approach to education” illustrates the point beautifully. I fully agree with the problem but not so much with the solution though.  May be because I see it from a developing country/livelihood earning perspective & he sees it from a learning/educated class’ perspective.

Nevertheless, I really liked the way Mitra articulates the problem. Romantic attachment vs Relevance. Some snippets from the article are given below.

Would a person with good handwriting, spelling and grammar and instant recall of multiplication tables be considered a better candidate for a job than, say, one who knows how to configure a peer-to-peer network of devices, set up an organisation-wide Google calendar and find out where the most reliable sources of venture capital are, I wonder? The former set of skills are taught in schools, the latter are not.

We have a romantic attachment to skills from the past. Longhand multiplication of numbers using paper and pencil is considered a worthy intellectual achievement. Using a mobile phone to multiply is not. But to the people who invented it, longhand multiplication was just a convenient technology. I don’t think they attached any other emotions to it. We do, and it is still taught as a celebration of the human intellect. The algorithms that make Google possible are not taught to children. Instead, they are told: “Google is full of junk.”

In school examinations, learners must reproduce facts from memory, solve problems using their minds and paper alone. They must not talk to anyone or look at anyone else’s work. They must not use any educational resources, certainly not the internet. When they complete their schooling and start a job, they are told to solve problems in groups, through meetings, using every resource they can think of. They are rewarded for solving problems this way – for not using the methods they were taught in school. The curriculum lists things that children must learn. There is no list stating why these things are important. A child being taught the history of Vikings in England says to me: “We could have found out all that in five minutes if we ever needed to.”

~ ~ ~

Methods from centuries ago may seem romantic, but they do get obsolete and need to be replaced. The brain remembers good things from the past and creates a pleasant memory of the “good old days”. It forgets the rest. It is dangerous to build a present using vague memories of the good old days.

Any standard room in a Holiday Inn is better than the best facilities in an emperor’s room in the 15th century. Air conditioning, hot and cold running water, toilets that flush, TV and the internet. The middle class lives better today than any emperor ever did. Going back to horse-drawn vehicles is not the solution to our traffic problems and pollution. Beating children into submission will not solve the problem of educational disengagement.

If examinations challenge learners to solve problems the way they are solved in real life today, the educational system will change for ever. It is a small policy change that is required. Allow the use of the internet and collaboration during an examination.

If we did that to exams, the curriculum would have to be different. We would not need to emphasise facts or figures or dates. The curriculum would have to become questions that have strange and interesting answers. “Where did language come from?”, “Why were the pyramids built?”, “Is life on Earth sustainable?”, “What is the purpose of theatre?” Questions that engage learners in a world of unknowns. Questions that will occupy their minds through their waking hours and sometimes their dreams.

Teaching in an environment where the internet and discussion are allowed in exams would be different. The ability to find things out quickly and accurately would become the predominant skill. The ability to discriminate between alternatives, then put facts together to solve problems would be critical. That’s a skill that future employers would admire immensely.

Imagining the end state (even though it is a process) in my head where kids learn things that matter, I am reminded of a poem I had read long time back and searched leveraging some of the skills Mitra explains.

Embrace the Change  ~~~

I changed the way the story ends

I changed the goals and sights I’d see I changed everything that made me me

I changed my mind I changed direction I changed how I viewed my reflection I changed right back to how I began Exactly the same but a completely changed man

By – Flying Lemming

Image Courtesy- www.photoshopessentials.com

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Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish — and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational “death valley” we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.