If you are a teacher, and you are trying to introduce new technologies or software into the classroom, be warned. You may be completely blown away by the shiny new devices, and the latest Kinect 360 or Nintendo 3DS may impress the heck out of you. But don't be surprised when the children in your class say, 'yeah, whatever'. It's difficult to impress young people with technology, but they can be impressed when teachers spend some time connecting personally with them, and helping them to understand. Children in primary schools only know the 21st Century. That is why it is important for teachers and parents to understand that they should learn in ways that they can dictate the pace and space of, rather than in the style that we have been accustomed to. Children expect and demand interactive content, because they have known nothing else in their short lives. They communicate through games. They speak the language of txt and connect constantly through social media. The ability to click or touch something to activate it is something they have always done. It's only a small step from there to making computers do things through non-touch gesture, or eye movements and facial expressions. The video below demonstrates how easy a 2 year old child can operate an iPad. She has her first encounter with it, and immediately knows intuitively how to use it. It reminds me of a quote from Marx (Groucho, not Karl of course) who said: 'A five year old child could understand this! Get me a five year old child!
Don't be surprised by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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