It is not the first time I have come across the fact that in the layman's perception, computer technology is inextricably linked with games. A huge number of people are absolutely sure that home desktops and tablets are primarily designed for games, and only some programmers and crazy scientists sometimes pretend that they are doing some serious business there.
And even more so it applies to children. If the child is sitting at the computer, then he is playing, there can be no other options. Meanwhile, modern computer technologies can perfectly serve your children in their studies. In this article I want to share my personal experience in this area.
My son is studying in an ordinary secondary school with all the charms inherent in our education. These are tired teachers from the Soviet era, terrible textbooks, peeling blackboards and the hopeless conservatism of the educational process. What new technologies, what modern theories, what multimedia? What are you talking about, the learning process has remained about the same as a hundred years ago in a parish school.
Of course, such an approach cannot captivate our children who are fed up with multimedia entertainment. Therefore, many, even very interesting topics on history, literature, geography, biology, being voiced by the monotonous voice of the teacher and visualized by several murky illustrations in the textbook, pass completely by their consciousness, causing nothing but boredom and yawning.
To solve this problem, I decided to use popular science films produced by Discovery, BBC and other well-known channels. There are a huge number of them on the web on almost any topic. I am sure that you are well aware of the quality, effectiveness and scope of filming such films, so there is no need to describe them. I will only say that, compared to a school textbook, such a film produces an incomparably greater effect on the student, giving not only factual material on the chosen topic, but also a lot of additional details that are not in any school textbook.
In practice, it looks like this. Now, when doing homework, the son, instead of reading a textbook, watches one of the films on the relevant topic. Although it may take much longer (some films run for about an hour), it arouses much more interest and desire. And most importantly — there is a huge positive effect — there is interest in the topic and noticeable progress in studies.
So, let's move on to some technical details.
A huge number of popular science, documentaries, educational films, videos, and lessons are available on YouTube. There are materials on almost any topic and for any age: from animated films for elementary grades to lectures by professors for high school students. If you can't find the material you are interested in, then you should look at Vkontakte. Yes, the same terrible contact can be used for useful purposes. Only it is best to look for the material yourself, so that the child sees exactly what is needed. This usually takes no more than 10 minutes. Then another couple of minutes is enough to evaluate the content of the film in order not to give the child some secret materials, secret versions and unconfirmed scientific hypotheses.
If you, like me, will use an Android tablet for this, then the following programs may be useful to you.
FREEdi YouTube Player
Under such an absurd name, there is a rather convenient program for playing videos from YouTube. My native client of this service plays streaming video extremely poorly, despite the sufficient channel width. FREEdi YouTube Player plays any video without stuttering, allows you to move normally to the desired fragment, has a user-friendly interface. The program has a convenient search not only for individual videos, but also for playlists. With his help, I learned that there are kind people who have already formed playlists not only for different school disciplines and topics, but also by class.
There is a version for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.
Vkontakte Music and Video
This program is great for finding movies in huge collections of Vkontakte. When you have found the right movie, you can immediately start playback through any player you have installed or download it to your device. Flash is not needed for playback, which may please the owners of some devices. For owners of apple technology, it may be suitable, but I haven't tested it for obvious reasons.
The result of such a reasonable use of computer technology and the Internet for education was not long in coming. After just a couple of months of such training, my son began to stand out vividly from the general mass of classmates. Peacefully falling asleep in class, the historian sometimes began to wake up from his answers and unexpected questions. And in the diary there were completely different estimates. Which is what I wish you.
