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Trouble getting a child out of bed in the morning is not a rare occurrence, but did you know that not getting the proper amount of sleep has a variety of consequences, including a decrease in I.Q.? Children who don't get enough sleep have trouble focusing on schoolwork, and their brains are not as adept at storing the information they do learn.
There are a variety of reasons children do not get enough sleep: Many kids are overscheduled and overburdened. After school activities, sports, music, video games, and homework quickly fill a child's evening hours. Parents sometimes have a busy schedule as well, making bedtimes later and mornings earlier.
Many parents would be surprised by how many hours of sleep their children should actually be getting every night. A general guideline from WebMD tells us that children 3–6 years old need 10–12 hours per day, and children 7–12 still need a full 10–11 hours, while 12–18 year olds can get by with only 8–9 hours of sleep a night.
A one hour difference of sleep can mean years for a child's intellectual capacity. Fourth and sixth graders were tested in a study by Dr. Avi Sadeh of Tel Aviv University for three consecutive nights. According to NY Magazine, one group went to sleep 30 minutes earlier than the other group, which stayed up an extra half hour. The performance difference that single hour created was an astounding two grade levels. The scores were further apart than the scores of a normal 4th grader versus those of a 6th grader. By losing a single hour of sleep, a child loses up to two years of his/her potential brain power.
In the same NY Magazine article, another study testing pre-kindergarteners found similar results. Every hour of lost sleep on the weekends, due to later bedtimes, caused a loss of seven points on a standardized school-readiness test. Elementary school students who had sleep problems also showed a loss of seven points on a vocabulary test. The reduction of seven points is the same I.Q. reduction as that due to lead exposure.
High school aged children suffer similar symptoms. A University of Minnesota study of more than 7,000 teens showed that the students who earned A's averaged 15 minutes more sleep than those who were earning B's. The students with C grades slept 11 minutes less than the B students and 10 minutes more than those earning D's. The results from this study were almost identical to those from another study of 3,000 high school students in Rhode Island. The numbers speak volumes. Every minute counts.
With a recent name change from Docs to Drive, Google is inviting schools to take a spin with their application suite. The popularity of this mobile-oriented software has seen steady growth throughout the U.S., and according to this Forbes article, there are 2000 school districts that have deployed Chromebooks to its staff and students.
As a parent, you might wonder what a Chromebook is and how it will support your child’s learning. It’s simply a Google computer loaded with popular Google apps and works primarily when connected to the Web. Your child can surf the Internet, send an email, compose as well as collaborate with others on a paper, presentation, or spreadsheet, and even publish the results of a survey to a website. These are common tasks of the 21st century student!
Google Apps for Education (GAFE) provides each school district with an administrative console to manage student account services, including email. It’s hard to beat the service when it’s free, but it works great for its intended purposes. It even allows your child’s files to be exported for use in Microsoft Office.
Student access to Google Drive is accessible from anywhere, and for those of you parents who are interested in reading some of your child’s work, it can be shared with you too. You might even collaborate on his/her document! If you have an Internet connection, your child will have no problem writing his/her next paper for class.
Google Apps is an amazing resource and will support the technology needs of your child while expanding his/her productivity skills into the future.