Mark's Health and Technology Blog

This video captures the importance of physical literacy for kids. I came across this video, created by the Canadian Sport for Life Alberta Community Recreation & Sport Work Group as part of a project funded by the Alberta Sport Recreation Parks and Wildlife Foundation to promote Physical Literacy and the Canadian Sport for Life Movement.

In Canada, a recent survey found that  although 58% of parents walked to school when they were kids, only 28% of their children walk to school today.
The study, commissioned by Active, Healthy Kids Canada, provides data that shows the decline in student physical activity linked to active transport modes such as bussing. Click on the link below to read full report.

Are we driving our kids to unhealthy habits?

I came across this brief write up for parents on the importance of maintaining their children's eye health and how to do so. Click on image below to go to full article.

I came across this insightful post about posture and its importance in young students physical, mental, and emotional development. There are some great look fors in assessing student academic performance or lack there of as a result of poor physical posture. A students' posture may tell others of diminished confidence or physical ailments that they are experiencing. Please click on the picture below to read the full article.

In light of the tragic events of the Boston marathon, I thought I would post several links, to strategies parents and educators may use, to broach difficult topics we hear about daily in the news. Please click on the image below to link to PBS parents.

I happened upon Royan Lee's blog during the weekend and was moved by his perspective on extra curriculars. I especially liked his list of extra curricular benefits to students and how it motivates them:

• Students and teachers can pursue personal passions.
• They tend to be growth-oriented.
• They are often project-based.
• Collaboration is valued highly.
• Losses and failure are celebrated as learning opportunities.
• There are often concrete goals to pursue.
• They tend to include mixed age/grade groups.
• There is much more movement, less sedentary work.
• Paper-pen tasks are rarely seen.
• There is very little rote memorization.
• The process is seen as more important than the destination.
• There are no standardized, high stakes evaluations.
• No one gets graded.
• Assessment is feedback and improvement based.
• The development of mastery is understood to be a long process.
• Students and teachers have autonomy for the direction of the activity.

This is a great little piece of research that shows the importance of developing healthy lifestyle habits at a young age. These habits carry on into a child's later life and may play a pivotal role in many other aspects of a child's life. Please click on link below.

This is a free iPad app for creating stop motion animation that looks professional. Very cool and very easy to use.

I stumbled upon this TED talk by Luis von Ahn and his idea to translate the web into every language for free through the help of online users. Forget ROSETTA STONE. Very entertaining talk. Enjoy.

Bilingual children have more adaptive brains as adults

This is a great reference site for parents and kids on exercise. There are great fitness tracking apps for iPhone and Android and many other great resources and articles.

Cybraryman exercise page for kids and adults

Making mistakes and trying again and again (and often again) until you succeed also encourages what's now being called a "prototyper's mind," an asset that many experts believe will be key to the 21^st century job market, where the majority of careers today's kids will pursue have yet to be invented. "

Maker Education Initiative website