teaching

Kids these days. They've never had to lock a floppy disk or dial a rotary telephone. It's a different world, and a survey by TeachHub.com and Clever Girls Collective shows just how much times have changed. The survey of 1,000 kindergarten through 5th graders spawned an infographic just in time to celebrate National Library Week.

Among the not-too-surprising findings, only 14 percent of the kids knew what the save icon represents. I'm actually surprised that that many of them recognized a floppy disk. They must have some old-school parents or an out-of-date uncle who is still rocking a Mac Classic.… Read more

Research has shown that frequent use of a computer mouse may contribute to repetitive motion injuries. KeyCue for Mac claims to teach users how to replace the mouse with keyboard shortcuts, but its limited functionality and its price make it less useful than it could have been.

A 30-day free trial version of KeyCue for Mac is available, but it costs $29.99 for the full version. The program downloads quickly but despite having its own installer, proved difficult to set up. We had to try the installation several times due to the program claiming it could not install while … Read more

2011 Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing is a new release of the popular typing-tutor app for iOS. The goal of the app is to teach you touch typing, and it does so using a combination of traditional typing exercises and some new multimedia twists. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing is available from the App Store and is easy to install.

The Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing interface starts with a classroom image, and you can click on hot spots for the different tasks you can try. Later editions of the app have added all kinds of new exercises, such as typing the lyrics … Read more

FirstWords Deluxe is a reading game for toddlers that helps teach letter recognition. This deluxe version combines all the words from the original FirstWords apps (for Vehicles, Animals, At Home, Colors, and Shapes, giving you 147 words in all) into a single app.

The friendly, cartoony interface is simple: once you tap one of the categories on the front page, you're shown a page with an object (such as a taxi or a color or a cat) along with scattered letter tiles that make up the object's name--which a toddler can then drag and drop into the correct … Read more

In what must have been some charitably-minded Googler's ambitious side project, the sprawling technology company has launched a sort of digital cheat sheet to solve the apparently ubiquitous problem of being asked to fix all variety of PC- and Web-related problems when visiting parents for the holidays.

The site, called TeachParentsTech, lets frustrated "kids" fill out a form that puts together a "virtual care package" to send to parents that will include links to Google video tutorials for all manner of basic tech support issues. In a post on the official Google blog, Googler Jason … Read more

AlgeBasics is an educational tool that helps users learn basic algebra. Although the program has a teaching component, we're not sure that users who are not already familiar with the basics of algebra will get much out of it.

The program's interface isn't the most intuitive thing we've ever seen, but it's fairly easy to understand. AlgeBasics covers four main topics: algebraic expressions, algebraic fractions, indices (positive only), and indices with negatives. For each of these topics users can either view a tutorial or work a set of practice problems. We found the tutorials to … Read more

Talking Flash Cards aims to improve math, spelling, time-telling, and toddler basics with visual and audio tools. Its simple navigation and a variety of options allow this program to be a favorite of parents and kids.

We could see children really enjoying these cards, especially since they look exactly like physical flash cards, but tack on a digital element that can't be matched with traditional cards. The math cards gave us multiple-choice options, the spelling cards and time-telling function read the answers aloud for us, and the toddler learning tools felt more like a digital See-and-Say than a computer … Read more

As children, many of us had fun with Mad Libs. You remember these; the game asks for a set of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other parts of speech, which are then inserted into a story with hilarious results. StoryMaker operates on the same basic premise, and is just as much fun.

The program's interface is rather unattractive, but it is simple and can be easily navigated by kids. There are large buttons for the program's four main functions. The first button let users play the game. The program asks for words in various parts of speech, and at … Read more

Teachers can test their reading and writing students' skills with Edit Prep. The program creates worksheets that students can proofread for correct punctuation and grammar usage, or read for contextual clues to test their reading comprehension skills.

We tried each of Edit Prep's three sections: Proofreading, Comprehension, and CLOZE Worksheet, which deals with finding contextual clues in passages of text. The program has a selection of sample text from well-known works of literature from which you can generate worksheets, or users can import passages from sources outside the program. We think teachers will enjoy this option, because they can … Read more