Statistics from Texting and Driving Safety’s website say that 77% of young adults are confident that they can text safely while driving. Despite this statistic, fatal car accidents have been caused by texting and driving. The world’s most successful phone company, AT&T has released a texting and driving documentary called, “The Last Text.”

“The Last Text” features four people whose lives have been impacted by a simple text message. The names of the individuals featured in the documentary are not mentioned, but if you take ten minutes of your time to watch the documentary you will think twice before texting and driving.

The documentary opens up with a highway patrol officer who talks about his encounters with multiple fatal accidents caused by texting. The officer has to pause for a second during the documentary because he becomes emotional discussing the young lives lost. Read the rest of this entry »

The recent documentary on CNBC, 20 Under 20: Transforming Tomorrow program, highlights an exciting shift in technology and education and it’s creating quite a stir. This program started when a visionary from Silicon Valley named Peter Thiel decided to undergo a search for the next generation of entrepreneurs. Mr. Thiel started a fellowship program where he offers the winning fellows $100,000 to drop out of college to pursue cutting edge business and technology opportunities.

The documentary tells the stories of the young men and women who are competing for the coveted prize. The most notable requirement of this program is that in order to become a Thiel Fellow you must walk away from your education to focus on entrepreneurship full time. There’s no secret that many successful entrepreneurs abandoned college to work on their passion full time. People like Michael Dell of Dell Computers, Mary Kay Ash of Mary Kay Cosmetics, Walt Disney, Henry Ford of Ford Motor Company, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are just a few super successful examples who dropped out of school.

Some major breakthrough ideas are in the forefront and presented by finalists competing to become Thiel Fellows. The winning Thiel Fellows include Connor Zwick, who left Harvard behind to revolutionize America’s education system, Noor Siddiqui, who plans to lift one billion people out of poverty, and Tony Ho and Anand Gupta who think they’ve found a way to help doctors catch cancer before it’s too late. Read the rest of this entry »

“I want to play Chinese!” is a phrase my two-year-old daughter often shouts out. I’m never sure if she really wants to play with Chungaboo’s iBook “Words: English to Chinese” or if she knows it’s a sure-fire way to gain access to the iPad. Either way, I call it a win. These books are so engaging with vivid illustrations by artist Miles Wisniewski and expert language translation voiceovers that even my toddler is picking up pieces of the Mandarin language and inserting it into every day conversation. Earlier this summer we introduced you to Chungaboo in a feature at Yahoo! Shine, Parents Should Load iPads with Chungaboo eBooks for Summer Learning, and we think no matter the season these books should be in your kids’ hands.

An article about bilingual children at Parents.com said, “The earlier you introduce a second language, the easier it will be for your child to pick up its unique sounds.” It went on to say that ages 2 to 3 are ideal for introducing a second language because it’s at this time that the “ability to hear different phonetic pronunciations is sharpest.”

We all know that children are sponges and are at the peak of learning ability in their earliest ages, so my husband and I loved finding Chungaboo (disclaimer: created by friends we met in college) for our daughter. She thinks it’s a game, we know she’s learning, and according to an article in the New York Times this past spring, each time she plays and picks up a new word she’s getting a little brighter. Read the rest of this entry »

If you ask a student if he or she were interested in math and science, statistics say they would more than likely give a resounding no over a yes. However, if you ask them if they are curious, they might be more apt to give a positive answer. A new site, CuriosityintheClassroom.com, capitalizes on this spirit of inquiry that children have by providing engaging learning materials for them, their parents, and their teachers.

Curiosity in the Classroom, a venture between Discovery Education and Intel Corporation, encourages students in grades 6-12 to ask questions and find ways to answer them.

Does our brain store all the memories we’ve ever had?

How many texts does an average teen send per month?

Are robots “intelligent”?

The answers may surprise you, and this website answers all of these questions and more.

This interest in scientific findings is more than just a way for kids to pass the time, it may be essential to their later success in finding employment, a career, and the good of the country as a whole. Resources on the website for teachers include troubling research about students’ perceptions of their science, technology, engineering, and mathematics skills, which are fields in which the demand is increasing, the unemployment rates are low, and the pay is great. Read the rest of this entry »

After months of anticipation, on July 26 Google announced the launch of its own ultra-fast Internet and TV service, Google Fiber. Google said that the Internet would be one hundred times faster than what most Americans have today, promising a lightning-fast 1 GB access speed. Want to download a movie? Download it in one second, flat. Google Fiber TV lets users instantaneously download, record, and store television programs as well as stream shows online with no wait time.

The service is currently only offered in Kansas City as the company tests its development. Kansas City competed with hundreds of other cities vying for the bid from Google for this distinction. Only neighborhoods where enough people pre-register for the service will be hooked up to Google’s own fiber cables that they have spent months running through the city, bypassing local Internet and cable providers. Google hopes to expand its service to other cities if Kansas City’s service goes well. In its first week of signing up customers, seven thousand households had registered. Read the rest of this entry »

My boyfriend is constantly on Reddit.com, so I finally caved and decided to check out the website that has a cute little alien as its mascot. Like most websites whose content is user-generated, there are a lot of cute pictures of animals, funny videos, and…oh wait, that’s not normal…a free university where you can learn about anything from art to languages to philosophy.

The University of Reddit is a new website that was created from a sub-Reddit. On UReddit, users can create their own courses and teach other users about whatever they want to teach. Some of the classes are introductory type classes (example: Hindi 101), while others are more advanced and specific (example: Vertebrate Palentology – The History of Vertebrate Life).

According to the creators, UReddit is “the product of free intellectualism and is a haven for the sharing of knowledge. Teachers and students are free to explore any subject that interests them. Unlike a convential university, University of Reddit strives to make its course offerings free, varied, and easily accessible. …Students don’t have to worry about attendance, grades, or tuition – this isn’t a regular university.”

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High school students in Camdenton, Missouri, can access Exodus International and People Can Change from their school computers. These websites are published by anti-gay organizations that offer advice for men and women who do not want to be gay. Essentially, they are telling people how to deny their natural feelings and pretend to be heterosexual.

The fact that students can access these controversial websites from a school computer is one thing, but when you take into consideration the websites that the school blocks, this becomes much more disturbing. Although students at Camdenton High School can access anti-gay websites, they cannot access websites that are supportive of LGBT people due to a Web filter that the school has been using.

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According to The New York Times, most foreign languages go in and out of fashion, but one language that is going to become increasingly valuable to know is computer code.

OK, so it’s not a spoken language, but learning to “speak” computer code is a great skill to have. The number of night classes and online classes that teach this language has been growing quickly as more and more people want to learn how to design websites, as well as iPhone apps. It also has many real-life applications for future employees, such as allowing you to customize a blog for your company, a skill which employers might find very appealing.

“Inasmuch as you need to know how to read English, you need to have some understanding of the code that builds the web,” said Sarah Henry, an investment manager. “It is fundamental to the way the world is organized and the way people think about things these days.”

Some colleges are also getting on board and offering classes that cater to this new field of interest. Stanford University offers two computer science classes that are free and offered online. So far, more than 100,000 people have tried out the classes.

Another way that you can learn computer coding is through Codeacademy, a new company that offers interactive lessons to help people learn how to write code. More than 1,000,000 people – including the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg – have signed up for the program since it started last summer.

Why the sudden interest in this field? I think that Peter Harsha, the director of government affairs at the Computing Research Association, said it best:

“To be successful in the modern world, regardless of your occupation, requires a fluency in computers. It is more than knowing how to use Word or Excel but how to use a computer to solve problems.”

What do you expect to see when you enter a library on an university campus? Besides dozens of students cramming information into their brains in the hours before an exam, I expect to see thousands upon thousands of books. However, as part of its overhaul of its library, San Francisco State University is going against the norm and has hidden away 75 percent of its books in favor of digitizing its collection.

This school is not alone. In fact, many schools are digitizing their libraries in an effort to make it easier for students to find the volumes they are looking for. At San Francisco State University, the old library was a “rabbits’ warren,” according to the librarian, Deborah Masters. Now, after its “facelift,” the library has put an emphasis on open spaces, more computer and technology available for students’ use, and areas where students can study in groups or grab a coffee in the new cafe.

Some books will remain on display where students can access them on their own. These books will be the ones that are in highest demand, were published recently, or are recommended by a specific department. If a student wants to reach one of the many other books that are not currently on display, he can enter his query in a search engine, which will then cue a robot in another building to retrieve the book and delver it to the student in the library. This entire process is expected to take less than 10 minutes.

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A new video is gaining a lot of attention on YouTube. The video, called “Facebook Parenting: For the troubled teen,” features a dad who is quite upset with something his daughter posted to Facebook.

In the video, the father, Tommy, reads a letter that his daughter, Hannah, posted to Facebook a few days ago. In the letter, Hannah rants about all of the chores her parents ask her to do…and by rant, I do mean rant. The video drags along for the first six minutes as Tommy reads the letter and expresses how upset he is about what Hannah wrote.

To be fair to Tommy, Hannah was very disrespectful towards her parents and used language that is not acceptable. Many kids today do feel too entitled and it does not make sense that a child should be paid because she is asked to help her family. I agree with almost everything Tommy says up until about the seventh-minute of the film. However, this is when things get a little too crazy for me.

At this time, Tommy gets out of his chair, shows us Hannah’s laptop, and proceeds to put nine bullets in the laptop from his shotgun. This seems like a bit of an over-reaction to me. If Tommy wanted to take her computer away from her and sell it, I’d be perfectly okay with that. However, he is acting immaturely and his actions are not any better than what Hannah wrote on Facebook. Instead, I think Tommy should have reacted in a more mature way by setting Hannah down, telling her what she did was hurtful and disrespectful, and then punishing her by taking away her computer and grounding her. By destroying her computer, he is reacting in a childish way that is just going to perpetuate the battle that is going on between them.

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