I want to share some of my plans for the coming site overhaul, more for me than because anyone else will actually read this. A big piece will be redoing the database backend to make it easier to associate cardsets that are the same but slightly different. For instance, let’s take the cardset with farm animals. There are different languages for this cardset — English and German. Let’s say I also want to add some new things, like a set that does animal sounds and a set that tells what the baby animals are called. Still, they are the same basic set.

Under the new schema, each cardset will have 3 identifiers. First will be the cardset ID. All the cardsets that cover basically the same content will have the same ID. Next will be the language. This will be tied to a little list of flag images, and the flag image will appear as an overlay in the lower left corner for non-English cardsets. Third will be the level. The level is not really a difficulty level (names of presidents are still way harder than animal sounds), but just a way for differentiating aspects of the cardsets. The level number will appear in the lower right corner.

The other thing I want to accomplish with the next overhaul is a robust user application for adding and editing cardsets. Right now, the image and sound must be uploaded directly into the card. In the future, the images and sounds will be uploaded first, into an image and sound repository on the server. Then the images and sounds can be dragged onto cards to create the actual content. I also want to add a nicer text editor, maybe something like the free one used in vbulletin, and have the cards display more user formatting choices.

The plan is that the kids will go to Houston next week and stay 2 weeks with Grammy, and if this happens I think I can make some big progress on my planned overhaul. However, Grammy fell recently and hurt her tailbone. She has a doctor’s appointment today and maybe after that we will know if the visit can still happen as planned. If not, this overhaul will still happen, but it will obviously take a bit longer.

I have had the merging of technology and education on the brain lately. My friend’s eight-year-old son doesn’t like reading so I invited him over to play Paper Mario on the condition that he had to read all the dialog. He read for almost an hour, until he had to go home. My mother was telling me about another friend whose kids wanted to watch TV all day, but Mom didn’t want to hear the noise. She made them watch the TV on closed caption and they learned to read like aces. Despite all the bad rap TV and video games get, despite how society pushes us to encourage kids to read books instead, I think these could be our biggest allies for teaching reading.

Anyways, I haven’t had much time to dedicate to this project recently, and not much motivation, either, since Little Girl hasn’t been too into it lately. However, in the last couple of days, she has taken to playing a bit again, and now she can play in quiz mode. Big Girl will sometimes play the quizzes, but on anything other than the “common words” category she is guessing, randomly clicking each picture in turn until she hears the answering “Correct!” Little Girl is NOT guessing. She navigates through quizzes of artwork, dinosaurs, trees, fish, and dog breeds like a champ, missing only one or two answers. Also, I am fairly certain that she recognizes some words, since occasionally the pictures for the quiz load before the sounds and by the time the computer reads the word her mouse is already hovering above the correct picture. Moreover, she now repeats the specific names of these items, even occasionally trying to use them in real life. “That’s a birch,” she told me recently, pointing to a pine tree. Well, maybe not…

I’m so proud of her, and starting to feel inspired to bust out some new cardsets. Stay tuned.

The main problem with Project Gutenberg, however, is that the books are not very well organized. While I can search on title or author, there is no way to search for picture books or books for young children. And so it has taken me quite some time to compile a list of picture books for possible conversion to this site. Since I am a caring, sharing sort of person, here is the list so far:

The Milkmaid
Come Lasses and Lads
The Babes in the Wood
The Tiny Picture Book
Ring ‘O Roses, a Nursery Rhyme Picture Book
Ride a Cock-Horse to Banbury Cross & A Farmer went trotting upon his Grey Mare
The Illustrated Alphabet Book of Birds
My First Picture Book
The Peter Pan Alphabet
Funny Alphabet
Dame Wonder’s Picture Alphabet
Fireside Picture Alphabet
Little People: An Alphabet
Little Mary
The Story of the Three Little Pigs
Little Bo-Peep
Little Yellow Wang-lo
Little Black Sambo
Little Black Mingo
A Little Girl to her Flowers, in Verse
Little Scenes for Little Folks
Little Stories for Little Children
Slovenly Betsy
The Jungle Baby
The Sleeping Beauty Picture Book
Baby Chatterbox
Wee Peter Pug
The Tale of Flopsy Bunnies
A Masque of Days
The Buckle My Shoe Picture Book
A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden
Baseball ABC
Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp
The Frog Who Would A-Wooing Go

the Rosetta Project - Pre-Reader and Very Early Reader

Many of these books can be adapted to my website with little or no modification! I am starting to feel inspired to do a couple this weekend… but have so many other things I should be doing… we’ll see

I also found a site by someone who did the Glenn Doman flashcards with her son for a year and who made all of her flashcard sets available online. I don’t think the images are public domain, but it is a good place to get ideas for complete sets without having to do so much research first:

Classical Mommy - The Bits Collection

Unfortunately, she ultimately came to a negative conclusion about the method, but after reading her thoughts I still think that the online flashcards approach minimizes the negatives and maximizes the positives of the program for the following reasons:

1. Using online flashcards minimizes the amount of time needed to develop the materials. Okay, obviously I’m putting a lot of time into it, but my visitors can get the benefit of my work with zero effort.
2. There is much less effort involved in running the sessions. Instead of drilling the flashcards with my daughter, I can concentrate on cuddling with her and telling her how sweet and smart she is.
3. My daughter gets to choose from eight sets which ones she likes the best, making the learning process more child-directed than the Doman method.

I have noticed some interesting trends lately:

• She never picks the cards with words only. Words and pictures together are much more entertaining.
• Ever since I added the numerals set, she never picks the red dots numbers any more.
• She loves looking at the common words over and over.
• When the common words are read in German, she usually says the English word instead of the German.
• When she looks at geography sets, she doesn’t repeat the countries any more. Instead she says “map” for each slide. The same thing with the dogs and dinosaurs, she just says “dog” or “dinosaur” for each slide.

Apparently the problem is with the flash wrapper (soundmanager2.swf) file that I am using to play the audio files. Since this file is fairly large and since it is accessed each time a flashcard set is selected, this file was getting too many simultaneous connections and slowing down the server. For now, my solution was to make multiple copies of this file. Every time a flashcard set is selected, it will now randomly access one of five copies of the flash wrapper. Hopefully, this will improve performance and reduce the time spent waiting for a set to load.

My kids are doing fine in school; they even like it. But you know what they come home showing me? Worksheets where they got everything right. That’s what they think they’re SUPPOSED to be proud of. That they can sit, and concentrate, and finish what they’re doing (they don’t get to go out to recess unless they do), and get everything right. Well, dammit, THAT’s not thinking. That’s learning to be efficient and get the answers you’re supposed to get. Thinking is something else entirely. Its being curious, and being wrong most of the time, and maybe, just maybe coming up with something you’ve made that you’re proud of and pleased with, something all your own (even if it turns out later that someone else had thought of it too).

For the most part, I agree with this statement. I don’t think rote memorization of trivia can be classified as “thinking”, although I do think it can be classified as learning. In my opinion, “thinking” is another level, where you can take all these facts you have learned and connect them in some way and use them to reach new conclusions. It’s not that memory work is not important. To a large extent the amount of thinking a person is able to do is determined by the number of learned facts they have in their memory banks to draw upon. But memorization is not, in and of itself, thinking.

I had one really good history teacher in high school that encouraged thinking. We were expected to learn historical facts, and then he would have us write an in-class essay each week that forced us to apply these facts to some question. I remember the first time I stepped foot in that class he had us write an essay about the moral implications of Columbus’ discovery of America. That was the only teacher I felt encouraged original thought, and it was one of my favorite classes, even if I didn’t always do so well due to not memorizing enough facts.

I think it’s rather sad that in 12 years in a pretty good school system I had only one teacher that ever encouraged me to THINK on a regular basis. Even in this case, I was told to direct my thoughts onto analyzing history, where I would prefer for people to be encouraged to THINK about how to create the best possible lives for themselves and humankind.

Obviously, a flashcard website is going to be geared towards memorization. My goal is to make memorization of facts more fun, more efficient, and less time consuming so that there is more time for actual creative thought.

Many homeschooling (and especially unschooling) advocates warn about the dangers of testing, including Glenn Doman himself, who calls testing unrewarding and unpleasant. John Holt also warns against testing and cautions that judgment can dampen the desire for learning.

However, I personally enjoy testing in a relaxed and non-judgmental atmosphere. Something about searching my mind for the correct answer seems to strengthen the neural pathways more than just being told the correct answer. I can say that while testing the multiple choice feature, my knowledge of geography has definitely expanded! One of my favorite websites right now is Freerice.com, a vocabulary building website where you select the correct definition of some scarily difficult words from among four choices (and every correct answer donates 20 grains of rice towards ending world hunger). I am hoping that adding this more interactive dimension will draw in older children (like my 4-year-old) who are not entertained by mere flashcards.

So try out the multiple choice and see how you like it, but please don’t pressure your little ones to move into testing before they are ready. Enjoy!

In the meantime, my friend Sara visited me this weekend, and she is from Germany, so please enjoy learning some German words with my new language sets. THANK YOU SARA! I still have more recordings to process, so more German sets are to come. I also have some number sets up in Spanish and Arabic, thanks to Ray and Komal.

I have been watching the traffic of this site, and I have noticed that I am starting to build a small base of users who return again and again. It is so encouraging to know that a few other people out in cyberspace are using my flashcards! I wanted to launch this blog to try to connect with regular users, to let you know what updates are in the works and to get your feedback and experiences with the flashcards. I may also write some technical posts on how to design web applications with PHP, mySQL, and Javascript. This blog uses WordPress with the Tm Clear n 1 1.0 theme, with very little modification, just my menu bar at the top. Please leave me a comment if you have time.

The other thing that is encouraging is using the flashcards with my younger daughter, Liane. She will turn 2 in February, and she has been playing with the flashcards since about 18 months. Her favorites are the animals and the household words, but maps and presidents and famous paintings all take their turns, too. Whenever she sees me on the computer, she runs up and demands flashcards!