Group items tagged

"My siblings and I were voracious readers as kids: Between Hans Christian Andersen and every last installment of Amelia Bedelia, my parents couldn't keep enough books on our shelves. If only we'd had the Infinite Adventure Machine. Developed as a spec project for Microsoft, it's a computer program that generates crude outlines for--you guessed it--an infinite number of children's stories. The only catch: You have to fill in the blanks."

"One of the things I like the most about iPad is its ability to support all the major e-reader platforms. Its interactivity and audio capabilities have even added a new dimension to read alouds and bedtime stories, making it an ideal device for digital storytelling. And since Educational Technology and Mobile Learning has already featured a List of The Best Digital Storytelling Tools ( web and desktop version ) then we deem it equally important to provide another list of such tools but this time for the iPad."

"I was lucky to have shared my childhood bedroom for a few years with my grandmother, when she had come to live with us after an illness. At bedtime, she would tell me stories of her parents and three brothers and growing up in East Prussia, fleeing to the West after WW2 and the things that occupied her mind. I was hooked on storytelling. The fascination grew when technology became available and opened up possibilities that were just not possible before. I would give anything to have been able to record my grandmother's stories and have shared them with my own children years later."

"One evening last week, I collapsed into bed after homework was finished, lunches were packed, and bedtime stories were read and happened upon an impassioned Los Angeles Times op-ed by high school political science teacher Jeremy Adams. In it, Adams decries his students' lack of interest in reading and places the blame squarely on smartphones. My kids are still young, but I'm always thinking of how to instill in them a passion for books, so I read on...on my smartphone."

"Some nights, it's like you can't get your brain to shut up long enough for you to fall asleep. You're mentally reviewing the day you just completed while also previewing the day ahead; sometimes, your mind may even reach way back into the archives and pull up something embarrassing you did back in high school. So fun! Racing thoughts can be a sign of a serious mental health condition like anxiety. But these nights also happen to everyone from time to time -- and once we're too old for bedtime stories, it's not always clear what to do. There's no one solution that will work for everybody, of course, so instead, we've rounded up suggestions from eight sleep experts. At the very least, it's something to read next time you can't sleep"

"Like a lot of children, my sons, Toby, 7, and Anton, 4, are obsessed with robots. In the children's books they devour at bedtime, happy, helpful robots pop up more often than even dragons or dinosaurs. The other day I asked Toby why children like robots so much. "Because they work for you," he said. What I didn't have the heart to tell him is, someday he might work for them - or, I fear, might not work at all, because of them. It is not just Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking who are freaking out about the rise of invincible machines. Yes, robots have the potential to outsmart us and destroy the human race. But first, artificial intelligence could make countless professions obsolete by the time my sons reach their 20s."

"e difference between quick skimming and scanning on the Web, which lodges in the brain's short-term memory and is quickly lost, and the long-term memories that a more thoughtful kind of slow reading provides. "I share Nicholas Carr's feeling that my brain has been rewired," he says."