The following is a email I sent to the Miami Dade School district people in charge of electronic education efforts today. Personally I've already told my kid's teachers that they are free to do whatever they want during school hours, but we won't be doing iReady at home. ------------------------------------------------------------- Great! Thank you so much.
Basically my theme is that I'm trying to find a way for Miami-Dade to switch from iReady to one of the other leading electronic learning providers. I did a lot of home schooling for my kids before they went to public school and so I tried them out lot and read up on the latest science for how kids learn phonics and such and so I was surprised to see us all standardized on iReady, which as anyone can tell within a few minutes of watching their kids use it, is sub-par.
For example, I noticed a few weeks ago it tried to teach my Kindergartner "Octopus" as a sight word. My 4th grader has similarly useless experiences with it.
However, there ARE good solutions out there and I wanted to see if we could push those in our schools. In particular I've had amazing success with HeadSprout (and the science is obviously much better). Likewise, Khan Academy (once kids can read) is great for Math and Social Studies, and Rosetta Stone is already offering quite amazing discounts for Miami-Dade (I talked to their sales team), but none of our schools seem to be taking advantage of it!
So my goal is to modernize our use of electronic learning - from iReady to a package of software that actually works. I'm of course happy to discuss the details behind why iReady is inferior, based on my experiences with more advanced software. :)
This little console is different - and that's a good thing
Like you, I know all kids are more addicted to gaming than they are to candy. But the problem is that most games ARE candy. So here's my review of the Steam Machine, which is another option you haven't heard of: It's very very good. Great for families - this review assumes you have three boys and also play games yourself so you already have a Steam library. In other words: Steam Machine is weird, and weird is good. Instead of playing Halo, have your kids play Goat Simulator, or a free Skiing game which is ALSO an MMO so thousands of people are skiing with you. Or have them run around protecting a baby that is trying to kill itself against strangers on the Internet. Or have them explore the ACTUAL UNIVERSE.
Downsides
First of all: it is not cheap. It is going to be anywhere from 500-900 dollars, with another hundred dollars for the extra controller you need and a wireless keyboard and mouse. For those of you who saw the commercials with the controllers, they were dead on. This is a better controller for gaming than the controllers you're used to. Every other controller makes you a sitting duck against players with a keyboard and mouse. People like to think they're going to create their own Steam Machine. But I learned long ago you cannot beat Dell when it comes to buying hardware at paper-thin margins, and then putting a working machine onto your desk.
The Controller is Amazing
You can use the Steam Controller to play Team Fortress 2 (as Heavy) perfectly well - which is a huge achievement. Or you can lay on the couch and put your wireless mouse on a book and play TF2 on your TV that way. But either way, Team Fortress 2 is a better game than Star Wars Battlefront.
It's true initially the controller was very buggy - but several firmware updates, handled seamlessly, seem to have fixed that. And the build quality is astoundingly good. It feels better than the XBox One or PS 4 controllers - by a lot. The haptic responses are incredible. This makes a difference when you have a four year old learning how to use it.
SteamOS is Great
SteamOS is great. It is a two-plug solution to getting gaming on your TV that integrates perfectly with your life. I'm not sure why anyone would complain about it - it's basically a completely duplicated version of the PS4 interface, just with Steam Games.
So about the Games. Not all the Games are good! But some are amazing and unique and beautiful. And most of them go on sale continuously and therefor you can get a set of great games for under twenty bucks.
I will list the games you should get below (I'll add to the list as things get ported over):
Team Fortress 2 (My entire family plays together)
Octodad (The best game ever - suitable for all ages)
Saints Row IV (Perfectly great with the Steam Controller - funny and fast paced)
Who's your Daddy (Hilarious game you play against random people)
Skullgirls (2d-fighting game)
Cities Skylines (Great for teaching kids about cities! Wouldn't you rather have your kid playing a SimCity clone than whatever their friends are playing now?)
Goat Simulator (Hilarious)
Half-Life 2 Pack (All of these games are classics - work great with the Controller)
So like all schools, my kids' school is half-public half-private. This means they run constant fund raisers. Of course, if they want to change the system long term, they need to be doing letter writing campaigns to increase school funding, which requires hiring a lobbyist instead of doing bake sales, helps every school instead of just your own, but whatever.
But let's go back to bullying - because like whatever school your kid goes to, mine did a big anti-bully campaign, which involved a lot of awareness that bullying is bad, including a poster contest. However, the concept of WHAT IS BULLYING is completely lost.
Let's take the current fund raiser - a walk-a-thon. I'm all for having the kids walk around outside. But in order to get money from the parents, the school has told all the kids that if they get 100% participation in a class, they get a Popsicle party. So essentially we are TRAINING THE KIDS TO BEND TO PEER PRESSURE.
Bullying, as all of you experienced it in school, is not a one-on-one situation. It is invariably a result of how kids form groups, and how peer pressure works. The bully always has a crew of people around them standing in a circle watching as they do their work. Nobody wants to raise their voice to protest.
This means that inadvertently, when we teach kids the massive value of conformity with sugary sweets it will lead only to bullying that is not stopped by even the BEST poster.
So if you want to succeed you have to take advantage of weird opportunities. For example: Universe Sandbox is 30 bucks - even if you only play it for an hour with your kids, tell me that's not worth it?
(http://universesandbox.com/) This is available for every platform, but I installed it on the Steam Machine in the living room so everyone could get involved. This is a key part of my learning strategy: While the 5yo cannot manipulate or understand the science, and the 4yo definitely cannot, they can both watch the 9yo get excited about smashing a moon into a planet.
And ideally, later on, they'll intuitively understand Space.
So much of what we've failed at in school is splitting up the grades.
So I bought a steambox for the living room. This is like a PS4 - but instead of PS4 games, you download Steam games. Not all games on Steam work, but some of them are exceptional (and in particular, they tend to be from Indy shops).
One of those, is OctoDad. You can get it for your phone too! Uninstall Minion Rush today, and get this instead!
So I want to create a formula for "Doing a science project with your kid" that is PAINLESS.
Now, most of you with male children have discovered that if there's one thing they don't want to do, it's professional-grade science project board layout. So here is a formula that teaches your kid science, without the sucky parts.
1. Obtain some animal or plant. (I ordered mosquito larvae online)
2. See how some substance (soap in my case) effects it when added. Do this maybe 10 times. Take pictures using your phone of the process as your kid does it.
3. Write whatever it is down on paper, but then enter it into Google App's spreadsheet with your kid. Click the five buttons you need to make a bar chart out of it. Print that shit out.
4. Have your kid use Prezi to create a small presentation about it, then download that presentation as a PDF which you can print out.
5. Paste the presentation, the pictures, and the simple graph on a poster board.
