Grasshopper New Media Presents...

There’s an article in this month’s Parent & Child magazine, put out by Scholastic, entitled Family 2.0. The thrust of the piece was how to regulate technology in your child’s life. Despite the “buzz word bingo” aspect of adding “2.0″ to everything, just like we add “gate” to every scandal since Nixon, I thought it was worth discussing what Parenting 2.0 might be.

I recently attended a great education conference, Educon 2.0, held at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. (There are recordings of the sessions on the wiki if you’re interested.) The most remarkable part of the whole weekend for me was seeing how this particular school worked. While the school is wired to appease almost any geeks’ wildest dreams, what is surprising is how the tech is not the centerpiece of the school.

Chris Lehmann, principal at SLA, talks a lot about creating a culture of caring at the school. The Students and people come first, the curriculum second, and the tech, third. The fact that every student has a laptop is not as important as the fact that every student has an adviser they meet with weekly. The use of podcasting and social media tools is not as important as the use of these tools to facilitate communication between students and faculty.

It’s clear the faculty are not “buddies” with the students, but mentors- people guiding their education. There are no firm right or wrong answers- students are actively encouraged to voice their opinions and their ways of problem solving. Kids learn as much from the process of learning as they do from facts they may carry in their heads. And more importantly, they learn to use the computers, wikis, social media tools and more as Tools- a way to get things done and accomplished, rather than as distractions. Teachers are also learning not to compete with what goes on on the screen, but how to help direct student attention when needed. The tech is merely a tool to aid expression, it does not cloud it.

What does this mean for parents?

The biggest take home message for me from the SLA experience is that relationships matter more than anything else. This school works because the relationships between the faculty and students is one of caring and concern. Community comes first. The exact same thing is true in our families- your relationship with your child comes first. You need to build that trust and become a person who can mentor our child, coach them, rather than order and supervise them.

This means unplugging your children and yourself. This means developing a relationship, developing trust. Take walks. Take them to a museum exhibit, and talk to them about why art and science are important. Put the stuff they learn into a bigger context, a context they can’t see with their limited experience.

The BBC recently reported that an estimated 13.5 million adults in the UK are stressed by having to use basic math skills, such as working out cooking times or accounting, and that basic math skills are required on average 14 times a day, while basic literacy skills are used on average 23 times a day. I used this article to point out to my students and my children that when they think “When am I ever going to use this?” while sitting in class, they need to remember how much of daily adult life depends on having good reading, writing and math skills. I remember being the kid who sat there, questioning whether I would ever really care about geometry proofs, not realizing how the real skill being taught here was one of logic and a step-wise approach to problem solving. If someone had told me that at the time, I am sure I would have tortured myself and my teacher a whole lot less that year.

Being Parent 2.0 is, at its heart, about knowing how to use tech and communication as a tool, not just as entertainment.

It’s about building one on one relationships with our kids, so they know how to build those relationships with others. And it’s about providing a context so kids don’t give up on the often slow pace of education, in search of the next stimulus in an electronic box. We need to let them know, and show them in real world ways, how learning about the history of the Egyptians and Hebrews in social studies can give you a perspective on strife in the Middle East, or how geometry plays out in figuring out how much paint or carpet you might need for your house. Bring the message home for them as much as possible. Often, teachers forget to do this for kids, and if you don’t help them with the “why”, they will tune out. “Just because” was never satisfying to me as a kid, and I don’t expect my kids to find that a satisfactory answer, either.

Take the time to answer the questions, to provide a context, and be assured you are developing critical thinking skills, which is really what our kids need, anyway.

by Whitney Hoffman

[tags]technology, education, modern, computers, classrooms, children, students, school, relationships, kids, parents[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by Brother O’Mara, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved