Keep Kids Sharp With Hi-Tech Learning

A-Plus Advice for Parents
By Leanna Landsmann

Q: I just got our school's packet on things parents can do to foster learning and it reads like it was written in the 1950s. Other than warning about the dangers of the Internet, there is no reference to digital projects. There must be some techie things we can do with our 7-, 10- and 14-year-old to promote literacy skills!

A: There are! One of my favorite ed-tech gurus, K-12 educator Jim Moulton, has a whole list. Moulton teaches teachers how to use new technologies to motivate kids and deepen engagement in learning. He blogs for an innovative education Web site, edutopia.org. (Bookmark it!) Moulton offers these activities to start you off:

• Family Photo Fun: One of Moulton's favorite sites, BigHugeLabs.com, makes it easy to put the family on the cover of a kids-created magazine. You can create other things, such as family trading cards with stats and motivational posters. "Because the results are JPEG files, you can pass them on," says Moulton, What better way to showcase kids poetry, for example, than to create a poster with it?

• Family Archive: During the depths of the school year, you'll want to bring up those family photos that made you laugh so hard this summer. Have kids organize, caption them and upload to a storage site. Moulton likes Google's Picasa. It's free. Take those funny snapshots and share them exclusively with family members and friends you select, says Moulton. (picasaweb.google.com)

• Kids' own comics: With Plasq, software created by Comic Life, you can turn family photos into comic books. (plasq.com). Moulton says that faster than you can say "Shazam!" your kids will be creating their own graphic novels.

• Family wikis: Planning a big family event? Set up a family wiki to share everything folks need to know about it. Moulton says this is also a great way for friends and cousins who only see each other during summer to stay in touch during the school year. To learn how to set up a wiki, go to edutopia.org/whats-next-2008-wiki-technology.

• Video on demand: You know all those cool YouTube videos your kids loved but forgot to save? Get your kids to store and organize them by downloading Miro (getmiro.com). "It's like iTunes for video," says Moulton. "You can save files on your local hard drive." There's more than entertainment value here. A good collection of content-specific videos on nature, sports, history and more can suggest topics for reports. This is a boon when a child announces Sunday night that he needs to find a topic for a report due Monday morning.

• Read around the world: Go to Newseum.org to read the front pages of newspapers across the globe. Moulton says "Your children are going to be players in a global economy," so it's important for them to become interested in what people are thinking about in other countries. Scanning the front page from a newspaper kiosk in Beijing, Beirut, Houston, London, New Delhi or Toronto is a good way to learn geography, too.

• Google Maps:  Another Moulton favorite for geography learning is Google Maps where "you can take a look at the neighborhood in a whole new way. Map skills are a key part of many curriculum areas," says Moulton. "Use maps.google.com to explore the settings of books kids are reading, look up places in social studies texts, and places in the news."