Long Winter
The weather has been miserable this winter. I want desperately to go outside. I have been running out during naps to feed chickens and grain the horses, I never grain the horses usually but it is so cold out. Yesterday it got clear up to twenty! We went out and played in the snow, it was fun. Last night she was acting a little sick. So much for getting outside.
The whole weather thing gives me lots of time to write though, for better or worse. I should be cleaning house I suppose.
My husband is a tech genius, he wont tell you that, he is humble, but I can say it, so we are inundated with technology around our house. It’s pretty cool. Combine that with my new favorite topic of child training and training a child to use technology effectively becomes a topic of interest.
The schools spend ridicules amounts of time and money trying to teach this. The attempt is failing miserably. It’s sad when there are so many very good resources out there. One option is the Raspberry pi. They are small, cheap computers, just a mother board really, and endlessly programmable. We have two of them and I’m sure will collect more around the house as my tech savvy husband dreams up more uses for them. We watch TV through it somehow, don’t ask me how I am not the techie, and listen to pod casts using the other. He talks about getting a camera and a waterproof case and taking time lapse pictures of the garden.
Right now there is a push for students to learn one hour of code. Our local school librarian/computer teacher has done this with some of her students they have some great resources available. I have had a page with lessons and games for beginners open on my desktop for a week now meaning to study up myself. Never do get to it, I’m the horse person not the techie.
We have some really cool games here, ready and waiting for The Goblin Child to get a little bigger. She has the want to, she is constantly grabbing at our phones, computers and remotes. She just doesn’t get that she is moving the mouse or pushing buttons for a purpose yet. Seriously, she’s only a year and a half, patience people, patience. But when she does, there are games available on Linux that boot through a CD or USB stick so a child can’t break the computer. My child can completely break a phone or computer with a single touch so that is very important. I played one the other day, when my husband was experimenting with them to see if he could get it to work. The one I played was fun and hard. We did physics with crayons, I am hopeless.
I also see talk of this sort of thing on my favorite homeschooling blogs. Penelope feels that gaming is a very good teaching tool, as a very beginner player at WoW, more on that later, I think it is incredibly difficult and I see how it would teach many skills including technology. I suppose we will let her dabble in that sort of thing also, with supervision of course.
That said I am off to read The Goblin Child a book, of the paper variety. Technology is great up to a point.