Children and technology

A couple of things have made me chuckle this week.  Firstly, my son - 8 years old, who likes to play Minecraft with his friends online.  At 8am in the morning, when the rest of us are bleary eyed and trying to rustle up enough energy to eat breakfast and psyche ourselves up for the day, he is chasing spiders and digging holes and building monumental structures with his friend.

People often say that technology renders our children unable to socialise properly, because they spend all their time looking at gadgets and games.  I would beg to differ: when I was eight years old, there is no way I would have been chatting to my friends, plotting our next move, or creating wonderfully imaginative lands at 8am on a school day.

The other thing that made me laugh this week was when I was Googling something.  I can't even remember what it was, but my 15 year old daughter was with me and we were looking for something together.  When we couldn't find what we wanted, I suggested we look at page 2 of the Google results.  My daughter laughed out loud, stared at me in amazement, and said, incredulously "who looks at page 2???".  Personally, I often look at page 2 and beyond, but it struck me as interesting that a teenager would view this as an epic fail, both in terms of Google's ability to 'know' what I'm looking for, and in terms of the user's inability to have chosen the right search terms in the first place.

That's all, really, I just thought it was interesting how these digital natives differ to me, especially given that I consider myself almost a digital native as I use the internet so much.

Evernote (again!)

Yesterday I had a session with my Photoshop learners.  They are a group of adult learners, and the course is community based (though still part of Coleg Gwent).

At the start, I got a learner to sit at the front PC which is attached to the White Board, and we did a recap of the previous session.  This rapidly digressed and we covered some really useful, though unplanned, extras.  I was conscious of the fact that the learner at the front was unable to take notes as she was controlling the PC which everyone was watching, but then I noticed her taking a quick snap of the screen on her mobile phone.

I asked if she wished to return to her seat, but she said that she was fine because she was taking photos of all the stages and sending them to Evernote.

This then lead to a discussion about the usefulness of Evernote (and similar online resources).  I showed my Evernote account to the group - most of which is work related although the first thing that popped up was a recipe for Toad in the Hole which I'd sent from my phone, which caused a chuckle.  The students were suitably impressed.

Many of the group were really interested in what such a package could offer them, and it was great to share something which I really think is very useful.  Digression is not always a bad thing in lessons!