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How To Keep Your Children Engaged in Online Learning by Craig Middleton

Friday, March 5th, 2021

Middleton New
How To Keep Your Children Engaged in Online Learning by Craig Middleton offers important advice for parents dealing with homebound children engaged in remote learning. By following his advice you can make remote learning more effective and enjoyable. Good luck.

Inroduction

Many schools have had to move to online-only or hybrid instruction as a matter of necessity over the past year. There have been some troubling stories about how this model has affected students, showing that they have suffered because of a lack of socializing with their friends. Some have reported a decrease in motivation.
On the other hand, some young people thrive in an online learning environment, even preferring it to in-person instruction. This may be based on many different factors, such as the child’s temperament or relationships with peers. However, it does offer hope that online learning can be more successful and less stressful even for those who struggle with it. Researchers have been looking for ways to help keep children engaged in an online classroom. Here are some of the ideas they’ve come up with.

Connect Learning to Something Concrete

Try to connect what your child is learning to something concrete and relatable whenever possible. For example, if you’re learning about different energy sources, tell your child about the top solar companies in the US and explain how they put what your child is learning to good use. If your child can see that what he or she is learning has practical, real-life applications, it is more likely to keep his or her interest. Children hate the feeling that they are wasting time learning something that is not useful to them.

8 tips

Keep in Touch With Your Child’s Teachers

With online learning, you may bear more of the responsibility for your child’s education than when your child receives in-person instruction. However, no matter what learning model you use, your child’s education is always a partnership between you and his or her instructors. When instruction takes place at home, keeping in close contact with your child’s teachers is more important than ever before.

Provide Positive Feedback

It is always important to acknowledge a child’s academic accomplishments”. It is even more vital to encourage those that happen in a setting in which the child may not be comfortable. Whenever your child completes an assignment through distance learning, provide some positive feedback. This can be something intangible, such as a few words of praise, or something more concrete, such as a sticker. It doesn’t have to be something elaborate or expensive, just something that communicates to your child, “I know this isn’t easy for you, and I appreciate the hard work you’re putting into it.”

Encourage Activity

Elementary kids get recess several times a day, while older kids get gym class. Your child’s online learning day should include some time for him or her to get up, move around, maybe even go outside if the weather permits it. When you schedule this depends a lot on your child’s learning style and preferences, but many kids settle down to concentrate better after some activity. If you find that a change of position helps your child concentrate better, you should encourage this, within reason. Standing up helps some kids to concentrate better, but you should not allow your child to adopt a habit of poor ergonomics because this could cause problems later in life.

Fun learning

Make Learning Fun

Schoolwork doesn’t have to be endless drudgery. There are many ways to make learning fun. If you’re having difficulty coming up with ideas on your own, the internet gives you access to thousands of them. Online games from educational sources are designed to teach a wide range of important concepts in an entertaining way. You may be able to take a virtual field trip to many educational places, such as aquariums, botanical gardens, museums, and zoos. Don’t limit yourself to local places; these tours are available from all over the world.

Set Your Own Schedule

Part of the reason that some children thrive in distance learning is that the schedule can be tailored to fit their needs. If your child is having difficulty understanding, you can slow down the pace. If your child is frustrated, you can take a break. If your child is very engaged, you can skip or postpone a break to keep up the momentum. Above all, be patient with your child and with yourself. Adjusting to distance learning takes time.

Craig Middleton

Craig is a New York City-based retired business consultant, who is an expert in education and cultural trends. He has a Masters of Business Administration and a Masters in Education from St. Johns and loves sharing his knowledge on the side through his writing. If you have any questions or comments you can direct them to Craig at craigmiddleton18@gmail.com.

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Six Creative Homeschool Lessons For Your Pre-Teen by Craig Middleton

Thursday, February 25th, 2021

MiddletonNew
Six Creative Homeschool Lessons For Your Pre-Teen by Craig Middleton may even work for your teenagers. Keeping kids engaged and ready to learn at home can be a challenge. You’ll need to make sure that you keep your child’s attention by mixing it up and involving some creative lessons. Here are six lessons to try in your homeschool curriculum to keep your kids excited while they learn.

1. Build A Solar Oven

Learning about energy and about how the sun can power things like solar panels gives your child an inside look at renewable energy sources. You can make a solar oven easily out of a leftover pizza box and a few other supplies you probably have on hand. While you’re building you can discuss with your children why certain materials are used. You’ll use some aluminum foil to reflect the sun’s rays toward the inside of your oven and how black construction paper on the bottom can hold in heat to begin warming your food. After your project is completed, you can use it to make a fun afternoon snack like s’mores.

2. Design A Building

If you want to teach a little bit about construction and engineering, have your kids design their own buildings. There are a variety of ways to do this sort of project. You could build with blocks or Legos, draw out a design, or even utilize a design program on your computer. Or you can make a day of it by combining all these elements from design to construction. Your student will learn about the process of design as well as about problem-solving while they try to bring their design to life.

3. Invent A Game

Get those creative juices flowing by leading your kids in inventing their own game. If you want to keep it quick and simple, help them come up with a new card game with their own rules. If you want to get fancier, take an old board game you don’t use anymore and completely reinvent it. Your students can cover the existing board with construction paper to design the playing board. Use some cardstock to create cards with instructions. Find some fun knick-knacks around the house to use as playing pieces.

4. Do Some Time-Lapse Photography

Time-lapse photography projects can be simple and short, or you can make it into an entire unit. Using an old webcam you can set up what you want to record and set the camera to take photos at pre-determined intervals. You could do something short-term such as recording leaves blowing on the trees in your yard for a few hours or longer-term like recording a daily photo of a plant sprouting. Once you have your photos you can help your kids put them together into a time-lapse video. This may even spark other photography-related projects like animation or a scrapbook.

5. Go On A Field Trip

A field trip is a great way to sneak in a lot of learning while you’re having fun. Research some possible locations in your area and reach out to them to see if they offer any special informational tours you can sign up for. If you don’t have time for an extended outing, you can make even a trip to the grocery store into a lesson. Teach your kids about math, budgeting, nutrition, and meal-planning while you shop for what you need.

6. Bake A Cake

Baking can teach your kids about math, measuring and chemical reactions while also teaching them valuable life skills. They’ll learn about following directions in a recipe to get the desired outcome. Once their sweet treat is baked and cooled they can get creative decorating it. Then at the end of the lesson, they can enjoy the fruits of their hard work by taste-testing their cake. Getting your kids active and involved is simple if you get a little innovative. Letting them get involved and engage in these hands-on projects will not only let them learn but also keep them entertained.

Craig Middleton

Craig is a New York City-based retired business consultant, who is an expert in education and cultural trends. He has a Masters of Business Administration and a Masters in Education from St. Johns and loves sharing his knowledge on the side through his writing. If you have any questions or comments you can direct them to Craig at craigmiddleton18@gmail.com.

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Grasp: The Science of Transforming How We Learn by Sanjay Sarma with Luke Yoquinto

Monday, February 8th, 2021

Grasp: The Science of Transforming How We Learn by Sanjay Sarma with Luke Yoquinto tells the story of teaching and learning during the last hundred plus years. They explain what works and what doesn’t. They make it clear that learning should be spaced rather than crammed at the last minute, that different concepts should be interleaved, and that the effort one uses to retrieve memories helps reinforce them. While we need to teach hard facts, we also need to let students use their hands to wield them. This book is a must-read for teachers and learners alike and would make a great textbook for any introduction to education course.

Introduction: The Adventure Begins

The big metaphor used here is the educational winnower. From the beginning, education is designed to sort students into gifted programs and elite schools. We think we are testing aptitude when we are mainly testing a student’s environment and experiences. At the end of the trail is the opportunity to innovate, which mostly ends up in the hands of males from wealthy homes (patent-holding inventors). In addition to gender, the great winnowers include poverty, expectations, and environments that lack access to language and feature lots of stress. In our efforts to standardize education we have made it too damn hard. We need to shed the myth that serious learning must be difficult and use what we know about the brain to make it more user friendly so we can save more students from the winnowing process.

Part One: Learning Is Science and Science Is Learning

1. The Learning Divide

Through the lens of a robotics course at MIT we learn that any education scheme worth its salt must not only deliver knowledge but do so in a way that is highly engaging. It must activate that knowledge so its owner can do real work in the world. Next Sanjoy plots the path that education took from the beginning of the twentieth century away from the holistic approach of John Dewey towards the reductionist path of Edward Thorndike. This lead to standardized education where repetition ruled based to an extent on behaviorism. IQ tests were used to sort students into tracks and if you weren’t sorted into the college track, you weren’t going to be prepared for college. Not only is this approach racist and classist, but it also conflicts with how people really learn.

2. Layer One: Slug Cells and School Bells

It is well established that spacing out your study rather than cramming all a once leads to more retention. This is even true for invertebrates without brains. Here we encounter Eric Kandel’s work with the large neurons in sea slugs. This lead to a Nobel prize for describing the connection between memory and the action of individual neurons. Repetition creates more connections known as synaptic strength. The concept of interleaving suggests that while you are putting space between learning efforts on the same content, you should work on learning another subject. It seems that universities feature a few high-stakes tests each semester with no return to the content in subsequent semesters in many disciplines. This goes against what we know about the spacing effect. Corporations, however, seem to know better as they teach and test frequently. This is due to the fact that their employees must understand the key concepts.. It’s clear that frequent low-stakes quizzes that continually call back earlier material promote efficient learning.

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Six Basic Tips for Online Safety by Craig Middleton

Friday, February 5th, 2021

Six Tips

Introduction

There’s an old saying that “knowledge is power,” and while that might seem cliché, it is true when it comes to internet crime. Hackers and cybercriminals are looking for information about you and your family. If they find the information they want, it gives them the power to steal from your bank accounts, destroy your credit, ruin your reputation, stalk your movements, and possibly even attack you physically. Fortunately, there are things you can do to keep information about yourself and your family safe. Here are some basic online safety tips.

Multi Factor

1. Enable Two-factor Authentication

Many online services give you the option of using two-factor authentication to access your accounts. In addition to your username and password, you also have to provide another piece of information. This prevents people from accessing your accounts even if they have obtained your password. It offers greater protection for your accounts, especially if the second factor is something entirely unique to you, such as your favorite vacation spot, recognition of your face, or a fingerprint. You don’t necessarily have to stop at two factors, though. Multi-factor authentication providers may be able to help you become even more secure.

2. Protect Your Passwords

Protecting your passwords is vital to maintaining online security, especially where two-factor authentication is not available. You should never share your passwords with anyone, not even those you trust the most. You should also avoid “default” passwords, opting instead for those that are easy for you to remember but difficult for other people to guess. Strong passwords have a combination of lowercase and capital letters, numbers, and sometimes special characters. Special characters aren’t always permitted, though, so pay attention to the rules when creating a new password. Another way to protect your passwords is to use a unique one for every login. This way, even if someone obtains the password to one account, the others are still protected. Be sure to keep a list or you may let your computer keep them for you if you don’t share it.

Avast

3. Keep Antivirus Software Up to Date

Antivirus is sort of a blanket term to describe software that protects against all types of malicious programming; not only viruses but Trojan horses, worms, etc. Not all antivirus programs include protection against ransomware, however, so this is something to pay attention to during purchase and installation. If your antivirus doesn’t have it, you may require extra protection.
Unfortunately, it is not enough merely to have antivirus software installed. Hackers are relentless at developing new programs that take advantage of outdated protections by exploiting their weaknesses. Therefore, you need to update your antivirus frequently to be sure it is equipped to deal with the newest threats. In many cases, you can set up the antivirus software to update automatically. This way, you don’t have to remember to perform a manual update

4. Use a Virtual Private Network

Chances are good that you do not only access the internet from your home. Free Wi-Fi is ubiquitous, and portable devices such as tablets and smartphones make it easier than ever to connect to the internet wherever you are. However, this convenience comes at a price. When you connect to an unsecured internet connection, it makes any data and files that you send via the network vulnerable to everyone else connected to it.
More commonly known as a VPN, a virtual private network keeps your data secure even when you connect to public Wi-Fi. It does this by encrypting your data and disguising your IP address so no one can use it to identify you. To add a VPN to your browser, you first have to purchase the best option for you, or try a free trial

5. Clear Your Cache

Many websites save information about you in the form of cookies. This saves your personalized settings for you on sites that you frequent, but it could also save personal information about you that you don’t want widely known. To protect yourself, you should clear your cache periodically. Most browsers will allow you to choose which sites you want to clear cookies from and which you want to save to keep your settings intact. If you want to clear all cache, you should be able to find the option in your browser settings under more tools → clear browsing data.

Fishy subject

6. Read the Email Addresses and Subjects of Unsolicited Emails Carefully

Pay attention to where your emails are coming from. It may be easy to trust an email coming from a source you would generally trust such as your bank, phone support, or work. Scammers can make an email seem legit at first glance, but always look at the email address if you are unsure of the source. If it is an email you don’t recognize, block the sender. Use your judgment, common sense, and intuition to guide your online activities. If something doesn’t seem right, don’t click on it, swipe it, or otherwise engage with it at all. If you think it could be really dangerous to you or someone else, report it to the authorities. The image above shows a subject and an email address that are clearly bogus.

Craig Middleton

Craig is a New York City-based retired business consultant, who is an expert in education and cultural trends. He has a Masters of Business Administration and a Masters in Education from St. Johns and loves sharing his knowledge on the side through his writing. If you have any questions or comments you can direct them to Craig at craigmiddleton18@gmail.com.

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The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health and How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Tuesday, January 12th, 2021

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health and How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral takes an in-depth look at the impact that social media has had on our society. He covers the positive and negative aspects and offers advice for how scientists, industrial leaders, and policymakers can collaborate to clean up issues associated with things like fake news, election tampering, and free speech. This is a book that every consumer of modern media needs to read so click here to get your copy now.

Preface: Pandemics, Promise, and Peril

Sinan’s Hype Machine is the real-time communications ecosystem created by social media. We start by seeing how COIVD pushed billions of more people to laptops and smartphones as many digital Luddites were forced on to various online platforms. Even routine users found themselves using it more and young people who were given limited screen time by parents prior to COVID started spending the entire school day online. People responded by organizing Zoom meetings to brainstorm problems old and new. As automated “bot” software along with cyborg and troll networks spread misinformation about things like COVID and elections, others got to work to fight these new digital enemies. As we have seen there is potential for great promise and peril. This book takes a look at both and offers suggestions for how we can make the most of the Hype Machine.

1. The New Social Age

Humans have always been social animals. The Hype Machine has simply poured gas on our campfires. It is designed to inform, persuade, entertain, and manipulate us. It learns from our choices and location to improve its persuasive leverage. The motivation of course is money. It can rightly be considered the social media industrial complex
We start with the story of how Russia used social media as a key part of their armed takeover of Crimea in 2014. Every time a pro-Ukrainian message was posted it was swarmed by messages from Russian bots and subsequently taken down. Most people were left with the idea that the people of Crimea wanted to be part of Russia.
During his PhD work, Sinan realized that statistics required observations to be independent while modern networking made everything interdependent. His epiphany at the time was that digital social networking was going to turbocharge how information, behavior, economic opportunity, and political ideology flowed between people. His thesis was on how information flows through digital social networks and as he now evaluates hundreds of companies each year, he gets to see what is coming. He knows that we don’t know enough and advocating for more research is a theme of this book.

2. The End of Reality

Fake news isn’t new, but the speed at which it can spread can cause real consequences. Rumors of gas shortages and a shooting at the White house caused long gas lines and a brief stock market crash. Some put out positive fake news about stocks they own and sell when the price goes up (pump and dump). We know that Russia made an effort to impact the 2016 election using the Hype Machine, but we don’t know the impact that effort had. Using social media in an effort to impact elections is a global problem.
Another area where fake news distributed by social media has had an impact is the world of vaccines. Anti-vaxers have used it and caused some communities to decrease vaccination percents below the point where they offer heard immunity. This has caused an increase in cases of measles, a disease that the US declared conquered in 2000. Another problem is that several studies show that false news spreads faster than real news. Political false news travels faster than any other category.
Social bots are software controlled social media profiles. They pounce on fake news and retweet it broadly. Real people then pick it up and do most of the spreading. They often mention influential humans who can give them a greater reach. Novelty attracts attention (the novelty hypotheses) and as a result, false news is more novel. Big repetition causes belief. (Doug: This is something that Hitler took advantage of.) People also believe what they already think (confirmation bias) so when you try to convince them that what they believe is false they tend to dig in even harder. Since fake news attracts more readers it makes more money by posting Google ads. This makes it a big business. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) pit two neural networks against each other. One learns from the other’s decisions and optimizes its efforts to fool the other. They can also be used for good. Deepfaked audio can allow one person to sound like another, which has been used to defraud companies.

3. The Hype Machine

The Hype Machine is an information processor regulating and directing the flow of information in society. It is comprised of the network itself, the interaction between people and machine intelligence, and the input/output device, which is most commonly the smartphone. In addition to these three components, there are the four levers of Money, Code, Norms, and Law. Networks learn about us by looking at who we are connected to, what we read, and what we buy. People tend to cluster and similar people connect. This causes echo chambers that spread fake news. If one person has strong connections to two others, the others are likely to have at least a weak connection. The small-world phenomenon also shows up in social media as the average distance between any two people is about 4.7 degrees, not six.
Sinan describes what he calls the Hype Loop. It starts with machine algorithms sensing who we are by what we say, what we consume, and what we do. It then offers suggestions for things like who to friend and what to buy. We then consume content based on the suggestions and finally, we take action such as making a purchase, sharing content with others, or voting.
Connections via social media platforms are much more likely to happen via suggestions offered by algorithms than by people searching. This may also contribute to political polarization as similar people get connected faster. Algorithms also recommend the content we consume. Facebook is now the largest news outlet. Its goal is to attract more likes and more viewership. Some things are best done by the machine. Spam filters and newsfeed ranking are examples. More reflective people tend to want their news recommended for them. Since our smartphones are always with us the Hype Machine is constantly learning about us. Apps constantly share data with five to ten other apps. The next big thing is likely to be the brain-computer interface so we can control things with our thoughts. Think of using your “brain mouse” to click on something you see in an augmented reality space.

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