Your children are growing up in the generation of technology, and although it is advisable to be conscious of the safety aspects of allowing them to use technology, it can be a great tool for education and learning. Here are some easy ways to use technology to teach your children useful skills from how to remove ketchup from clothes to advancing their education with online tutorials.
Fun educational apps
The most obvious way of using technology to help your children learn new skills is to find educational apps. If you’ve got younger children that haven’t started school yet, then you can help ease them into learning with apps that teach how to count or learn the alphabet. Whilst older kids can benefit from more comprehensive learning apps for complicated math or science.
Get creative in the kitchen with interactive cooking fun
Another great way to incorporate fun interactive learning with your kids is to watch online video tutorials, and videos showing you new recipes to try and how to recreate them are great ways to get your children involved in the kitchen. It’s the perfect opportunity to teach them about kitchen and food safety, as well as how to live a healthy lifestyle. This activity, whilst being fun for all the family, will help to set your kids up for life with important basic skills.
Start with simple cooking videos for foods your kids will love, like pizza, or basic tomato pasta dishes. Mess may be inevitable, so be prepared! You’ll have helpers, so don’t worry about having to deal with the mess yourself; find out how to remove ketchup from clothes, or wipe down surfaces, and get the kids to help out.
Get creative with online tutorials for arts and crafts
The internet is a hive of information and ideas to create amazing art and feed a creative mind. Simply go online and search up some kid-friendly arts and crafts ideas. You can find heaps of inspiration on Pinterest or YouTube; you might decide to use online tutorials to create paper flower bouquets, build a spaceship from old cardboard items, or perhaps introduce them to digital drawing apps. Don’t miss out on some amazing arty fun!
Photography and Filmmaking using phones or digital cameras
As technology advances, so does the move from paper learning, and future careers are becoming far more dependent on tech skills. These days cameras are easy and cheap to come by, and by using phones and digital cameras, you can help your kids get creative whilst developing an understanding of the technology available to them.
Photography is a great way to start, and although kids are on social media from quite a young age, perhaps there are better ways to cultivate their love of photo-taking. Take them outside and show them how photography is a means of wonderful art, and a fab way to express themselves and an appreciation for the things around them. Teach them different ways of using a camera, the aspects of photography of different subjects, or allow them to take part in competitions, there are so many skills that they can learn when you allow your children to discover life with a camera in hand.
Kids love movies and storytelling, so why not encourage them to make up their own stories? Teaching them to edit these films using simple basic software, and even allowing them to share them online will help them to move into a whole new realm of possibilities. You never know, you may be raising the future Steven Spielberg!
Learning to Play an Instrument
For musically inclined kids, you can encourage that they learn the basics of playing a new instrument using the power of online tutorials. There are a myriad of great instructional videos that take you through the first steps of playing piano for example. Music lessons can be an expensive commitment, so why not get your children to try learning at home before committing to lessons?
Once your children start using technology to learn how to remove ketchup from clothes after cooking a homemade meal, take the best photos, or make their own film, the sky is the limit of where educational technology usage will take them. Encouraging them to use technology in their education will allow them to keep up with the moving times as we move into a world where technology contributes to a huge portion of our life and work.
‘This post was written in collaboration with Katherine Mosquera and Naomi Hassan from Mavens of London. Naomi has written for various food, lifestyle. and parenting blogs, and continues to work alongside Mavens of London to create immersive articles and blog content.’ – ‘Katherine has written and edited a range of articles from home and lifestyle, to food and fashion, and is currently a content creator and editor at Mavens of London.’
