Lego calendar by Vitamins

The Lego calendar by Vitamins  is another neat way to track your time, tasks and appointment. Here it is: 
"The Lego calendar is a wall mounted time planner that we invented for our studio. It’s made entirely of Lego, but if you take a photo of it with a smartphone all of the events and timings will be magically synchronised to an online, digital calendar. It makes the most of the tangibility of physical objects, and the ubiquity of digital platforms, and it’s also puts a smile on our faces when we use it!

For more info visit vitaminsdesign.com/projects/lego-calendar/

Code will be shared online soon!"

Lego calendar by Vitamins from Vitamins on Vimeo.

Mind maps tools

Mind mapping is one of the most powerful visualization tools for ideas, flows, goals - whatever we want to achieve. Here are some of my most favorite tools. These tools may LOOK fuzzy and cute, but they can change the way you brainstorm your ideas. So here we go...

Value points with Kids chores and task board.

Kids enjoy games, especially when we win prices and especially when it’s fun, and done with us (their parents). Games and prices are huge motivators so sometimes it’s so simple to teach a technique using simple price with a simple game. Just think about video games for a moment, they are an amazing way to achieve a feeling of success, almost every video game has a reward in it.

Before we start explaining the kids tasks Value Point Game, I wanted to present this game as it was used by one of the scrum teams I worked with. The team came with this idea to use  MnM to measure visual value points of user stories.

What did they do?

Each user story in the backlog holds a deferential value, represented by points.

Each MnM color represents a deferential project portfolio type (Risk projects, Bread&Butter’ project and more)

Each flow step rewords with relevant sweeties:) according to the value this user story holds.

When the user story is done, we can eat out its MnM’s. Just for fun.

Well, they didn't have to do any of this, it was just for fun, and it remained fun. And it was effective too,  Fun always get things done better.

How can we use this at home with our kids chores?

Simple, Decide on the amount of points that each task in the backlog holds.

Each Done task rewards the total family point’s repository with its relative points.

At the end , The points can be represented candy, MnM, or just any color Round Sticker if you like.

The goal, achieve the day points by starting from the most valuable tasks (those with more points).

For those of you who don’t know the entire agile methods, keep on reading into this blog to follow some important tips:

1.       Keep all tasks visible.

2.       Keep tasks simple.

3.       Make sure each task holds a definition of done.

4.       Keep tasks small and achievable.

5.       Do one thing a time.

6.       What important is the effort invested in a task, more than its actual success.

7.       Empower your kids, to select , move and reward their tasks

8.       And don’t forget to have fun

Want to read more?

• Identify Quick wins – Apply Agile at home
• What is the Best way to make mistakes and win? Play video games
• The cards on the wall

Learning a routine, using a task board with kids.

A routine is A prescribed, detailed course of action to be followed regularly; a standard procedure. Kids are not born knowing how to follow a routine. So sometimes we need to teach them how to follow a set of steps, a routine till it’s clear to the child what is expected to be performed.  An obvious example may the morning routine in which we need to wake up , prepare to school and eventually get out of the house ; or the evening routine ;even a routine of learning the alphabets may not be so obvious for kids.

Let’s take the morning routine as an example: if it’s an issue, here’s another simple tip (among many in this blog) to help you get this going. Just build a routine task board.

1.       First step will be to visualize your tasks, using drowning or pictures . Visualization works wonders with kids. Make a list of tasks on the board according to the order expected.

2.       Make sure to mark tasks when they are done. Do it with your child! It usually works best with smaller kids. The mark can be a smile, a star or whatever incentive to continue to perform his/hers tasks and learn the routine.

You can collect the marks during the week, or count them for a price or a praise.

3.       Never assume that just having a task board for your child will make him/her perform his chores. No matter what kind of a task board you use with your child, don’t forget to talk it over with the child every day. This is the agile part. Let your child be an active part on planning his tasks, placing them on the list or board, performing them and moving them around. Don’t do it for him/her 

There are many other ways to deal with routine tasks, or learning a routine you just need to pick whatever fits your best.

For more articles about the subject of how to get your child performs his task or various task boards, you can read here:

·         Are we overloading our kids with tasks? And if so, what can we do about it?

·         The best way to deal with kids and their chores

·         How Agile helped a father get his kid to tidy the room

·         Using Task Boards with Youngsters

·         A mother creative solution for helping her girls with their homework

·         How not to set tasks on the family Kanban board

·         Permanent task boards are nice, but they aren’t the point!

·         What is a schedule board?

·         Using the task board to initiate the family dialog.

·         Operating a task board in 10 min

The Rule of Getting Things Done - 70-20-10 - Studying Versus Learning

This is an awesome rule to follow if you want to get things done (GTD).The 70-20-10 model suggests that lessons learned  effectively are roughly 70% from tough jobs, 20% from people (mostly the boss), and 10% from courses and reading. It applies to learning, innovation , savings and marketing, conducting organizational change, content management many other fields. Just follow 70-20-10   model. 

Embracing Social Media in School

Teens are actively Tweeting, Posting, Liking, and Commenting all across Social Media anyway . When used properly, social media tools can boost student engagement, link students to content experts and real-world examples of classroom lessons, and help them establish an online body of work. All sides will benefit : students , educators and parents.

Stories of Families Going Agile

Agile has Crept into our homes. Here are published stories of families becoming agile and adopting the powerful agile methodologies.

Roojoom - Awesome Collaborative Tool for Educators.

Well, I’ve been working with these Roojoom guys for a while now and decided to share some of the great benefits the Roojoom application can add to educators, classroom, children and many more... I’m sure you’ll find your best fit after reading this post.

So what is Roojoom?

Roojoom lets you turn bits of content into a story, using an easy re-narration tool where one post seamlessly leads to the next in a most reader-friendly and engaging way. It allows synthesizing information to fit to the relevant audience only. It allows users with various information resources (sites, you-tubes, documents, blogs…) to scope the readers to the exact relevant content taken from those sources.

 

Why Roojoom is a good fit for educators and Students?  You can see for yourself, here’s a bunch of examples ת Just click to look inside...

Synthesize education materials, Prepare to an exam, Communicating important materials parents should know about,Better Collaborate classroom information.

You can have your child create a Roojoom of a specific topic, have her search the web, learn the topic and present it in one Roojoom. Children are creating Roojooms as well.

And more….

And don’t forget to have fun… ho.. you won’t… because Roojoom is fun!

My Roojoom Profile:  http://tracks.roojoom.com/u/shirly-ronen-harel

live at www.roojoom.com/all where you can experience the beginning of our vision.

What is the Best way to make mistakes and win? Play video games

Play is a vital part of being a person, and failure is a vital part of play. What is the role of failure in video games? Do players prefer games where they do not feel responsible for failing? My boy for instance, he's a champion in computer games. The kind that has levels, adventures, where the main player gains power and knowledge... And he didn't start playing from the highest level becoming a champ without making mistakes, right?! He kept failing, fixing, repeating, experiencing again, getting better, failing again.. and in the end he feels on top of the world. Why?

How to succeed in making mistakes?

Personal Agile Development - Failures, mistakes and experiencing are great levers to success.

When I have autonomy I grow. Yes, and mainly when I have room for trying and making mistakes.

"The only way to not fail is to not try" or "you learn from mistakes" - these are sentences I believe many of us hear over and over since our childhood. Cliché? I think not.

The room for trying and making mistakes is one of the things I believe in the most. After all, we all make mistakes all the time. The question is do we learn from our mistake?. Truly learn. And the more important question is do we know how to make mistakes in order to learn?

No. Don't avoid making mistakes. Really don't. I even recommend feeling free to make mistakes. Don't stop trying even if it means making mistakes. The idea is to know how.

My boy for instance, he's a champion in computer games. The kind that has levels, adventures, where the main player gains power and knowledge... And he didn't start playing from the highest level becoming a champ without making mistakes, right?! He kept failing, fixing, repeating, experiencing again, getting better, failing again.. and in the end he feels on top of the world. Why? Because it's OK to fail and fix. Because he has the space, the legitimacy and autonomy to fail. His feeling of success comes from his ability to fix and make progress. There's nothing like small failures and small successes as part of an experience to make us feel capable and successful.

http://gamertherapist.com/blog/2012/04/07/failing-better/?goback=%2Egde_53475_member_106232276

Same goes with me. My ability to grow will be possible through the experiences I go through. But not just any experience, it's my ability to fail, to fix, try again and get better...

I don't have to get scared and shy away every time I make a mistake. I do have to be brave, take a good look at my mistake and improve on it.

So how to succeed in making mistakes?

1. Don't be afraid to try. How do people become master sportsmen? How does someone become a master at any field? By trying. A lot. Trying that comes from the ability to learn and get better.

2. By making small steps, our mistakes will also be smaller, more digestible and easier to fix. They will also increase our sense of autonomy to make mistakes. Just like in a computer game. Small mistakes are more controllable, they teach us more. They are also less scary, less noisy and are surely less harmful.

3. Inspecting our experiences and our mistakes is another important part of knowing how to make mistakes. After all, we wouldn't want to make the same mistake twice, would we?! Our mistakes are vital for our continuous improvement. They are great learning tools, because they provide us with a perfect context to our actual reality and not to what our reality should theoretically be. This is why looking at our mistakes and asking what have we learned from them, what we should stop doing and what we should start doing differently is a good and brave way to learn. I think cooking can be a good example for this. Is a recipe perfect the first time we try it? Or do we need to retry and refine it several times until I understand what are the right ingredients for my palette, until I find the "right mix" for me?

4. Sometimes we'll make small, controlled experiments, so we can test how reality responds to the change we want to make. But this will be a small experiment, so if we fail we can learn, fix and try to make it better. Small mistakes that entail some preliminary probing of the reality we have coming, are both controllable and help us learn.

5. Also from big mistakes - which regrettably do happen - we ought to learn. We won't rule ourselves out for our past mistakes. It is important for us to look back at the past, take with us what helped us get passed the hard times and learn what not to repeat.

6. By making mistakes we learn how to avoid some of them in the future. 

And... Don't forget to enjoy the journey.