To let the kids entertain them self with an iPad or an iPhone seems like a good idea.
But the question is: How are they affected when their time playing outdoors is decreasing and they are amused by a screen instead of using their own imagination?
The founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, refused his kids to use an iPad. New York Times reporter Nick Bilton tells the story about how he one time asked Jobs ”So, your kids must love the iPad?”.
Steve Jobs answered:
– They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.
Chris Andersson, chief executive of 3D Robotics, is on the same page in an interview with New York Times.
– My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and overly concerned about tech, and they say that none of their friends have the same rules. That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.
For example: What happens when we no longer write by hand? Not much, many of us think.
But now, psychologists and brain scientists means that it’s way too early to condemn the normal pencil as a thing from the past. New studies shows that the relationship between writing by hand and the educational progress are deeply combined.
Kids do learn to read faster if they learn to write by hand, but they also become better at creating ideas and remember information. So, it’s not only about what we write. It’s also about how we do it.
“When we write, a unique nerve is automatically activated. And it seems like this nerve, in a unique way, contributes in a way we didn’t realize before, because it helps the process of learning”, Stanislas Dehaene says, a psychologist at Collège de France in Paris.
Another study followed kids from 4th to 7th grade. Virginia Berninger, a psychologist at the University of Washington, showed that when kids put together a text by hand, they not only produce more words than they did with a keyboard, they also expressed more ideas.
Dr Berninger implies that scripting teach self-control in a way other forms of writing don’t, and some scientists even suggests it may be a way to treat dyslexia.
But the advantages of writing by hand reaches far longer than to our childhood. For adults, writing by hand can be a quick and efficient alternative.
Two psychologists, Pam A. Mueller from Princeton and Daniel M. Oppenheimer at the University of California, Los Angeles, showed that students learn more when they take notes writing by hand, instead of using a computer. According to new science, it gives the student an opportunity to process a lectures content and convert it. A process that may lead to better understanding and make it easier to remember.
