Catch the Wave » Internet

Young Kiwis highly connected

Lyn — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:55:46 +0000

By JOHN HAREVELT – The Press | Monday, 26 January 2009

A “flagship” Unicef report, The State of the World’s Children, rates New Zealand’s 15 to 24-year-olds among the best-connected with cellphones and the internet.

There were 94 cellphone owners and 79 internet users per 100 Kiwis aged between 15 and 24, the report said.

DIGITAL WORLD: Sinomi Hood, 15, left, Brooke, 14, and Sam Fairs, 16, all of Christchurch, each carry their own cellphones, iPods and MP3 players. A ‘flagship’ Unicef report, The State of the World’s Children, rates New Zealand’s 15 to 24-year-olds among the best-connected with cellphones and the internet.

Read the full news article on the Stuff Website

Has your brain changed?

Lyn — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 06:59:19 +0000

I read an interesting article on the Dominion Post website today. With the subtitle ‘Scientists say tech savvy are set to take over’, its about the way the Internet is altering our brains and the way we think. “Gary Small, a neuroscientist at UCLA in California who specialises in brain function, has found through studies that Internet searching and text messaging has made brains more adept at filtering information and making snap decisions.” He argues that “the people who will come out on top in the next generation will be those with a mixture of technological and social skills.” What are your thoughts about the article and what are the messages here for 21st century educators?

Zoho Creator – a fantastic online tool

Lyn — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:16:56 +0000

Zoho Creator is one of the ‘Zoho Work Online’ applications and it really is fantastic! It’s an online data base and form creator and is so useful for easy data collection. If you need to collect any sort of information from your principals and teachers, why not walk the talk by using the Internet and online resources to do this? Zoho Creator has many uses and the extra bonus is that teachers are developing ICT confidence and skills at the same time.

Recently, in preparation for a cluster trip to Palmerston North, I added a trip registration form to the eBest ICT cluster website for the teachers who were going to add their details. I alerted the ICT Lead Teachers to this form by email. The first photo shows the form and the second is a part of the spreadsheet of collected data. I then exported it into Excel. It worked perfectly and saved me a lot of time. And no, I didn’t lose anything! Click on the graphics for a bigger view.

Zoho Creator is easy to use and free. (It has been so far!) You simply drag and drop the fields you require from the selection (see below) and add your questions or choices. The result looks really professional and has many uses for principals, teachers and students. Try it out.

Getting more intelligent

Lyn — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:52:49 +0000

The online world is absolutely enormous now and I think I tap in to only a very small part of it. Some days I hear about something that’s been around for a while and I wonder how I didn’t know about it when other people did. That’s part of what makes the Internet so much fun. (What will I learn today? How did they do that? How could I use this? How can I find out about …?) The availability and depth of online resources and opportunities are amazing. And we are increasingly expecting other people to have the personal ability and tech capability to access these resources as well. We refer to website, online forms and are using the Internet for communication, collaboration and problem solving.

For some time now I’ve being telling people that using the Internet is making me more intelligent … sometimes they laugh, but I’m serious. So it was interesting to read an article titled ‘The World is getting Smarter’ which mentions ‘The Flynn Effect’. Your IQ is likely to be higher than those of your parents, and your children’s IQs is likely to be higher than yours.
“Our advantage over our ancestors is relatively uniform at all ages from the cradle to the grave,” says Flynn.
Wikipedia gives a possible explanation – ‘The general environment is today much more complex and stimulating. One of the most striking 20th-century change in the human intellectual environment has come from the increase in exposure to many types of visual media. From pictures on the wall to movies to television to video games to computers, each successive generation has been exposed to far richer optical displays than the one before and may have become more adept at visual analysis.’
Flynn’s thesis shows that whole societies can get better at thinking if they’re given the right environment. ‘The mind is supple and the Flynn effect shows that what we value gets stronger.’ This has huge implications for education … and never more so than now.