Sitting at the table in his sunlit kitchen, Jayden was excited to show me a new video on his iPad. More proficient with the technology at age 5 than some adults, he pulled up a video on the screen and said, “Let’s start the magic trick!”

This post is part of Seeding Reading, series of articles and analysis by New America’s Ed Policy Program and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. See also the Learning Tech section of EdCentral.org and the JGCC blog.

As we watch together, Jayden and his dad appear on the screen in the middle of their living room, accompanied by a large cardboard box. As the video plays, Jayden crawled into the box and his dad closed the lid… shouting the magic words, Abra Cadabra, his dad opened the box. Jayden had disappeared.

“It’s not a box… it’s magic!” he shouted, looking up from the screen at me and smiling.

Jayden and his parents made the video together after they read the children’s book, Not a Box. Throughout the book, an ordinary box is—with a little imagination—transformed into a rocket ship, a racecar, and many other fantastic items. The book captured Jayden’s imagination: his box wasn’t just a magic trick; in another video, he and his dad pretended the boxes were pirate ships, using their imaginary oars to row along.

Even more intriguing: This wasn’t a scene from a middle-class, Caucasian household: Jayden’s father is a migrant farmworker. He and his son were presenting their magic show in Spanish.

In the rural town of Milbridge, Maine, visiting with several families whose primary home language was Spanish, I saw example after example of creative, intentional use of new technologies for language learning. Not only were the children excited and engaged in learning, but their parents were confident in guiding them to these learning opportunities using new technologies.

In a country struggling to provide equitable early learning opportunities after the great recession, confronting an enormous word gap between low-income children and their more affluent peers, and often confounded by the additional challenge of educating dual-language learners, what is different about Milbridge, Maine? And, equally important, are there lessons there that resonate for the rest of the country?

Around fifteen years ago, Milbridge experienced an influx of migrant farmworkers. Then—as today—migrant families often pieced together year-round work through a combination of blueberry harvesting, wreathe-making, and other seasonal labor. While Milbridge’s residents are primarily white and English-speaking, the migrant families moving to the area were primarily Hispanic and Spanish-speaking.

Working to build a more inclusive community, the Milbridge Public Library, Town Office, and schools strove to improve and expand their programs and resources to serve both their English- and Spanish-speaking residents. In 2005, Mano en Mano (Hand in Hand)—a new, local non-profit—officially was formed to coordinate the provision of basic resources, education programs, and other services for migrant families new to the area.

Like many rural communities, Milbridge has just one small public school for children from kindergarten through eighth grade. There’s no local Head Start center, preschool program, or other early childhood education opportunities to speak of.

That began to change in the summer of 2012, when Mano en Mano started a new, and somewhat unusual, early childhood education program supported by federal funding for migrant education: Comienza en Casa, or “It Starts at Home.”

The Comienza en Casa program was designed to work closely with parents, through home visiting and monthly group meetings, providing them with the information and materials they need to promote their young children’s school readiness at home. The curriculum intentionally integrates new technologies—specifically iPads—in order to organize materials for parents, balancing screen time with activities to develop skills offline.

Jayden’s was one of four families approached that summer to join the program’s pilot. At the time, Juana Rodriguez Vazques, Jayden’s mother, told me that she was unsure what she could do to help her son learn in preparation for school. They did not have a tablet or broadband connection at home, and working with this technology was also an entirely new experience. The Comienza en Casa program set out to change both.

Jayden, using an iPad with his family

At the beginning of the program, they and the other families were given an iPad to use throughout each of the month-long units—the materials for each unit were pre-loaded on the devices. Ana Blagojevic, the program’s coordinator and home visitor, brought the iPads to each family’s home a few days before all the families first met as a group, giving each time to explore the materials independently. When they met, parents were able to learn from one another’s questions about the materials and the technology.

After that first meeting, Blagojevic visited each family to help parents one-on-one. Working with parents in both English and Spanish, she has been able to further explain the units and resources, as well as field further questions and help troubleshoot with the technology.

Bonnie Blagojevic, an education consultant who has worked with children for over twenty years, came to the program through her daughter’s involvement. She has become an expert in sifting through the vast assortment of digital literacy materials available. Culling through thousands of e-books, apps, and games, she and Ana have built each unit—organized around math, pre-literacy, and science concepts—through curating the best materials in English and Spanish.

Families in the community do not have consistent home access to broadband, so materials are limited in some respects. For example, before bringing the iPads to the families’ homes, Ana Blagojevic had to download videos so that they resided on the devices; there was not enough bandwidth at their homes for live-streaming.

Even so, from what I witnessed in my visit to Maine, parents quickly realized the devices were more than just screens—these iPads provided much-needed and language-accessible resources, while the program provided a solid structure, for empowering them to help their children gain critical school-readiness skills.

Exploring the apps and materials with Jayden, over the past two years Juana says she has become adept with the technology and apps as well. She now feels confident in her ability to help Jayden prepare for kindergarten. “[At first] I didn’t know how to practice with him or show him what to really do, but the program gave me lots of ideas and activities I could do,” she said.

Through the program, Juana also heard about and applied for the AmeriCorps Program, and through it has been volunteering with Mano en Mano to help build out additional community partnerships. In addition to working with Jayden, she has been working within the community helping other parents master the new technology and digital materials. This past spring, she organized a community fundraiser to purchase additional Spanish-language materials for the Milbridge Public Library.

The kindergarten teacher at Milbridge Elementary School, Suzen Polk-Hoffses, has also begun incorporating new technologies into her classroom—including several iPads for stations and group work. Working with Comienza en Casa, Ms. Hoffses had helped Bonnie and Ana identify critical school readiness skills; as she has sought to integrate technology into her teaching, she has been working with Juana to better understand the technology and tools as well.

Last Thursday, the Technology in Early Childhood (TEC) Center at the Erikson Institute held a webinar, “Engaging Families to Expand Early Learning Opportunities: How Can Technology Help?” where Ana, Juana, and Suzen shared what they have been working on in Milbridge. A group of over 100 educators, administrators, researchers, and other early childhood education specialists participated online, learning about the program’s use of new technologies for not just media consumption but also for creation, and the intentional use of creative play. The program was also highlighted in Pioneering Literacy in the Digital Wild West, a 2012 paper that led to our Seeding Reading series, as well as within a chapter by Lisa Guernsey and Michael Levine in the new book edited by Erikson’s Chip Donohue, Technology and Digital Media in the Early Years.

As Jayden prepares to go to kindergarten this fall, Juana is making her own preparations to start a teacher training program at a local college. Comienza en Casa does start in the home—but if educators and early childhood programs can borrow from the lessons of this tiny town in Maine, its impact will have a much wider reach.

Lindsey Tepe is a program associate in the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation. She previously conducted research on a number of programs and policies affecting the public work force. Tepe graduated from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, with a Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree.

Part 17 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning

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Many teachers are excited about trying games in the classroom but don’t know where to begin. The landscape of learning games is vast and confusing — and it’s growing and changing rapidly. Moving at the pace of the software industry, games are often updated and iterated so that new versions replace familiar ones before you’ve even had a chance to implement them in your classroom routine.

And teachers have busy schedules. We have barely enough time to complete our prep or even to provide students with as much written feedback as they deserve. Exploring such unfamiliar territory as games for learning takes a considerable investment of time and energy. For over-scheduled and underpaid teachers, available time and energy is already scarce and face-to-face classroom time is our top priority.

On the other hand, not exploring, updating and reinventing our teaching strategies can cause us to miss valuable opportunities to reach students. We all chose teaching because we love it, and a good teacher is constantly motivated to improve the classroom experience. Games are a great tool that can add a spark of new vitality. But how do you go about choosing the right game? What criteria should you use to pick a game for your classroom?

IS IT FUN? OR, IS IT COOL?

Selecting the right game can be like walking the teachers’ tightrope. Both engagement and academic rigor need to be priorities, but there is often tension between them.

This is the same tension an English teacher might be forced to mediate when picking a text. For example, as much as I might want to assign James Joyce’s “Ulysses” to a class of sixth-graders, the chance that it will engage them is pretty slim. They would likely struggle with the complexity of the language and we would hardly be able to address the thematics. It would be an uphill battle against student boredom that would not serve anyone.

A great literature curriculum considers the particular students in the class and chooses books that are simultaneously fun to read, academically challenging and provide important canonical touchstones that can help contextualize future learning. Satisfying any one of these criteria, without the others, is problematic. The same is true for learning games. But for some reason, when it comes to games, many teachers are confused about the difference between “cool” and “fun.”

Cool and fun are not the same thing. Cool has to do with a game’s aesthetics: the art, sound design, characters, narrative, et cetera. But a game does not need to be cool in order to to be fun. Don’t be seduced by the spectacle. Making coolness a priority is tantamount to choosing to teach literature with “People” magazine because the students like to read it. Sure, pop culture gossip would satisfy the engagement criteria, but it wouldn’t satisfy any of the other academic criteria.

Think about games the same way. There’s nothing wrong with cool, but if it’s our primary criterion, we are catering to our students instead of challenging them. Don’t meet the students where they are: Help them to move incrementally from one place to another. Look for games that are fun rather than games that are cool.

THE MECHANICS MATTER MOST

The best learning games are always fun. Try playing them yourself and see if you enjoy them. No matter how advanced your understanding of the subject matter, a good game should still be fun. I’ve understood algebra and number partitions for decades, but “DragonBox” and “Wuzzit Trouble” are still challenging puzzlers that I like to fiddle with on long airline flights. All good games offer challenges in intuitive ways. In fact, this is the reason games work so well for learning: Players are intrinsically motivated to identify and succeed at understanding the game’s mechanics.

Mechanics are what game designers call the collection of rules and structures that produce the actual game play. The mechanics organize the game’s components in the way that defines how a player’s actions will have an impact. In good learning games, the subject matter is always embedded into the mechanics themselves. Learning to navigate the game’s mechanics and learning the academic subject matter are one and the same.

Bad games sometimes attempt to simply graft a topic onto existing game mechanics. They might add vocabulary words to “Angry Birds,” or multiplication tables to “Temple Run.” It never works. The best learning games teach in the same way good teachers teach: They don’t trick students into being interested, they help students find genuine excitement in learning a subject.

ARE YOU COMFORTABLE?

In order to find genuine excitement in learning a subject, students need to be comfortable with the game. In order to leverage the potential of learning games in the classroom, teachers need to be comfortable, too. When choosing a game for the classroom, you’ll need to assess comfort levels. And the factors that influence a teacher’s comfort level are not necessarily the same factors that will influence the students’.

For students, playability is the most important comfort factor. If the game is too complicated, they’ll spend more time trying to play than they do learning from playing. Look for games that seem simple to play. Paradoxically, the games that seem the simplest are usually the most complex. That’s because they do a good job at instructing students slowly. They teach one action at a time, in baby steps, until the complex world of the game seems intuitive. Suddenly, the students get it. And simultaneously, because the mechanics and the academics are one and the same, they’ve succeeded in meeting the learning objectives.

In order to facilitate this, teachers need to be comfortable, too. You should be comfortable not only playing the game, but also integrating it into your curriculum. Make sure that you remain in the curricular driver’s seat. Don’t allow the game to dictate the curriculum, nor the assessment strategy.

From a curricular perspective, the best implementations see learning games as just one of many learning activities. The combination of activities are designed to offer multiple entry points to a key academic lesson. Each entry point is a perspective — a single lens into a complex subject. Allowing any one perspective to dominate the conversation does your students a disservice. Look for games that enhance what you already do, not for games that disrupt your current strategies.

When it comes to assessment, many games have robust back ends that provide assessment data about the students that play them. The data can be extremely useful, providing information about your students that is applicable well beyond the game itself. Teachers, however, need to make sure they’re comfortable with the game’s assessment strategies. Don’t allow the game to tell you how to assess, make sure it strengthens your current practices.

Remember, the games are tools to make your work more efficient and effective. Make sure you’re using the game, and that the game is not using you. And make sure you explain to your students how and why the game fits into the larger context of the classroom.

Students might play the game willingly, but that doesn’t mean they understand how it relates to the other activities. Take the time to explain why you’ve chosen the game. Or, even better, let it be a class discussion. Ask your students to discuss what they’ve learned from the game and how it fits into the larger class context. You’ll likely discover that the game is working in ways you never could have imagined.

Part 16 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning

The textbook is a problem that consistently plagues classrooms. At best, textbooks are innocuous, offering simple summaries of a very broad subject area. At worst, they oversimplify things, providing less information than an encyclopedia article without enough nuance or context to make it meaningful.

Amplify’s digital offering includes a dramatic reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” with animation.

One study showed that when students read textbooks, they tend to retain “absurd” details, but fail to “grasp the main point.” Susan M. Hubbuch writes, “The trouble with too many textbooks is that they are badly written” and “badly organized.” What’s more, they give students the wrong impression about knowledge. Typical subject areas — physics, geography, algebra — are all dynamic. “They are constantly being critiqued by members of the field, and all are open to change.” The traditional textbook approach, however, gives students the impression that knowledge is constructed of static ideas, facts, and definitions. [Watch this scene in Dead Poets Society that perfectly captures this quandary.]

Teachers have always struggled with mediating the tension between the need for stable content and desire to support our students as they become creative and flexible thinking individuals. How can we keep things open-ended without doing a disservice to children? How do we encourage students to remain invested in learning ways of knowing that will always be questionable and uncertain? The very purpose of an education is to teach fluid critical thinking skills, to maintain analytical perspectives about the world, to teach people that problems can never be solved with certainty. But sometimes the way we teach contradicts our intentions. Sometimes we forget that what we teach and how we teach it will always be inseparable. And textbooks, unfortunately, seem to structure learning in a way that’s antithetical to our intended outcomes.

Just as we need to move away from a top-down model of teaching, we also need to move away from the textbook. In an ideal world, all learning would happen through direct engagement with primary texts. But unfortunately, not everyone can be a historian, perusing through documents and artifacts to piece together an account of the past. Nor can everyone read Euclid and Pythagoras in the original Greek. Some summarizing, briefing, and encapsulating will always be necessary. But is the problematic textbook really the only way?

Many ed-tech entrepreneurs are currently attempting to address this problem with games and electronic media. It’s probably an oversimplification to say they’re attempting to update the textbook because to understand precisely what they are trying to do, we need to step outside of our habitual way of thinking about school and learning.

Game-based learning and electronic media enable us to blur the boundaries that separate the delivery of content, drilling for practice, and assessment. And in an educational atmosphere where those boundaries dissolve, the textbook becomes obsolete. Certainly, there is still academic content, but that content suddenly becomes interactive. The texts can be more easily and immediately tied directly into a broad set of activities and projects. Video and other multimedia content can be integrated right into the text — perhaps videos of teachers–enabling the kind of flipped instruction that is rapidly becoming popular.

One company that is really pushing a new approach is Amplify Learning. They call their tablet-based platform a “digital curriculum.” In time for fall 2014, they released ELA programming for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students that includes more than 300 books and “academic lessons authored by world-class intellectuals.” Amplify has always focused on the content, and in addition to comprehensive interactive reading and writing activities, they also include some pretty dramatic and animated readings of classic texts.

At the time of release, Amplify CEO Joel Klein said, “This is not some old wine in a new bottle, like a digitized textbook with a few animations. We’ve brought together world-class instructional materials, rich multimedia and a powerful analytics engine that will transform the way teachers teach and students learn.”

What’s most intriguing is the way Amplify curriculum integrates games. They’re designing a suite of tablet-based games that are not envisioned as part of the formal curriculum, but rather as opportunities for additional student directed playful learning.

One such game is meant to let students experience the process of  metabolism from the inside. It’s a fun game, where players need to manage their resources carefully in order to win. Students need to understand how each resource plays a part in the metabolic system. The game teaches basic biological literacy. Amplify is also making some other impressive biology, environmental science, math and literacy games.

“The goal of our games is to both help recapture lost learning time—both after school and during holidays—and engage kids in ELA, math and science in ways that weren’t possible until now,” Klein said in an interview. When I asked him if he thought electronic media would detract from more traditional forms of text-based learning he said, “Our goal is to encourage more reading and more writing. I think that if we can help middle school children develop a love for reading books, the positive impacts of that will be felt across their entire educational career.”

The game Lexica is a great example of Amplify’s approach to games. Lexica is a literacy game that Greg Toppo covered beautifully in USA Today. Toppo describes Lexica as “a massive role-playing game for young teens that invites them to interact with characters from great novels and read the books outside of class if they want to get ahead in the game.”

Players free classic book characters that have been trapped in an imaginary library by an evil empire. By reading the books, students learn what kinds of powers the characters can offer them. They are motivated to save the characters and to do so they need to read the books.

Lexica is so comprehensive that the sheer scale of complexity overwhelms. There are even mini games that, like everything in Lexica, require familiarity with the characters and plots of classic books.

Many teachers have concerns about Amplify’s corporate origins and connections to News Corp mogul Rupert Murdoch. Questions about private for-profit curriculum development and the conflation of media and education demand a lot of consideration. And Amplify is not the only company we should approach with caution. But for the purposes of this post, it is the quality and ingenuity of the curriculum that interests us, the way the company’s curriculum designers are rethinking not only the textbook, but also educational content delivery in general.

Other companies are developing games that are imagined to be played all semester long. These are often multiplayer games that classes play together. For example, Muzzy Lane has developed a series of games that provide an immersive experience for students. There is one, in particular, called Government In Action that’s designed to allow students to “role play a member of Congress as a way of exploring American Government.”

Students sponsor bills, trade in influence, awareness, and approval. The game simulates meeting with lobbyists, donors, and volunteers. The object is to get reelected to office. It is a strategy game that requires students to become familiar with the mechanics and processes of U.S. government.

When a role-playing game like this supplements typical classroom content, students see how their new knowledge manifests as better in-game performance. They learn how the government of the United States works through the experience of digital simulation rather than through memorizing textbook blurbs and taking quizzes. The knowledge is contextualized and the motivation is intrinsic.

For middle school students, there are games like Historia. This game started as a paper-based role playing game in which students “work in teams to lead fictional civilizations that compete alongside (and sometimes against) the great empires of the past.” Now it’s being developed into a tablet, or PC based game that uses new ed-tech. One of the great things about Historia is that, like a textbook, it forms the skeleton of a full curriculum. However, it also requires traditional teaching and ordinary research skills. Students use the information from book-based learning, handouts, videos, and other academic materials as if it were a collection of “power-ups” meant to give them the strength they need to succeed in the game.

The thing about interactive electronic media is that it allows us to rethink the way we interact with information. The internet has already changed the way we think about media and now it is time to let it redefine the way we think about content in general. Academia was about participatory knowledge construction long before buzzwords like “crowd-sourced” entered our mainstream vernacular. But many of our academic conventions, like the textbook, have neglected to preserve the spirit of collaboration. Even worse, these methods of teaching have taught generations of young people that facts are fixed.

Video games are one method of interacting with content in context that can change students’ approach to knowledge. Games can help them to understand that all ideas are located in some dynamic stage of ongoing iteration. And games can help to teach our students the value of a cooperative (or multiplayer) construction of truth.

This excerpt originally appeared on New Learning Times and appears here with permission. New Learning Times is produced by EdLab, a non-profit research, design, and development unit at Teachers College Columbia University. EdLab’s mission is to facilitate the future of learning through technology. Read the full post here (registration required).

As Founding Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, located independently at Sesame Workshop, Dr. Michael Levine serves at the nexus of research, innovation, and transformative partnership-building. With a distinguished career as an agent of change in the nonprofit world and an advocate for digital learning, Dr. Levine’s history of impactful work is demonstrated in his past roles as Vice President for the Asia Society; head of Carnegie Corporation of New York’s early childhood initiatives, education-focused media, and primary grade reform; as well as in his role as Senior Advisor to the New York City Schools Chancellor. Dr. Levine is a recurring advisor to top government officials on the topics of education, technology, and early childhood and has contributed to a variety of online and print media outlets, while being regularly chosen to headline conferences focused on early childhood, education policy, and digital learning. Dr. Levine received his Ph.D. in Social Policy from Brandeis University and his B.S. from Cornell University.

EXCLUSIVE NEW LEARNING TIMES INTERVIEW

Question: How did your educational trajectory (background) affect your current work?
Answer: I am fortunate to have had fabulous mentors who have helped guide my career trajectory. To start off, my parents were both activists—my dad a civil rights organizer and an expert on intergroup relations, and my mom a mental health leader, concerned with the rich dynamics of children and family life. I studied with the great developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner as an undergrad at Cornell, along with an amazing group of young scholars such as Dr. David Olds and Dr. Laurence Steinberg. The perspective I gained on cross-cultural research that led to policy reforms shaped my professional passion for creating lasting change on behalf of vulnerable children globally. Finally, the work I did at Carnegie Corporation on the importance of school reform, early development, and action-oriented philanthropy was central to my interest in “field-building” and making tighter connections between research, practice, and policy.

Question: What professional experiences have been most formative to your current work?
Answer: My early work in public policy—working first for the Mayor of NYC Ed Koch and Schools Chancellor Richard Green—shaped my concern for underserved kids. I learned a great deal about the importance of framing key issues through strategic communications techniques in a way that would build public support for new investments in children. Frankly, I also learned just how hard it is to effect changes that have the intended impact. I was fascinated to see how difficult it is to take research findings or “best practices” established in model programs serving families and actually translate them into coherent policies that would drive scalable change. While at Carnegie Foundation I also learned about the value of “thinking and doing,” that is, we were able to convene and support the very best minds in the world to analyze and dissect a problem and, then invest in the creative solutions we had designed together. That was a special privilege!

Read the full post here (registration required).

Flickr/ Daniel Go

Apps for social communication, learning, and play are a prominent part of nearly every family’s life today. Are they having a similar impact on how families and educators help their children learn to read? And if so, what kinds of apps are they using?

As part of Seeding Reading: Investing in Children’s Literacy in a Digital Age, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and New America are analyzing the app marketplace to answer these questions. In 2012, we conducted a baseline scan (See Pioneering Literacy In the Digital Wild West). In this post and more to come, we will provide a sneak peek at our updated scan.

Uncharted Routes to Reading

A 2013 national parent survey conducted by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center confirms that the presence of mobile technologies in the homes of young children and families is on the rise. The study found that 71 percent of young children live in a home containing at least one smartphone, and 55 percent of children have access to tablet computers. The same survey indicated that 35 percent of children between the ages of 2 and 10 years use educational apps at least once a week.

With these mobile apps, families now have opportunities to learn anytime and anywhere, whether in the car, on the subway, or waiting for prescriptions at the pharmacy. But most families are left to plot their own route, selecting app resources with very little guidance on the best digital resources for children’s language and literacy learning.

Scanning the landscape of children’s language and literacy apps

This post is part of Seeding Reading, series of articles and analysis by New America’s Ed Policy Program and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. See also the Learning Tech section of EdCentral.org and the JGCC blog.

While our first report yielded notable insights about the kinds of language- and literacy- focused apps available to families, we realized that the ongoing proliferation of mobile technology and apps since 2012 warranted an updated analysis of the landscape. We wanted to take a deeper look at the kinds of apps available to families with children 8 years old and younger by coding additional aspects of the app descriptions and content.

Our goal was to put ourselves in parents’ shoes. That is, if parents were searching for apps that could help their children learn to read, what would they find? How many such apps are featured prominently on lists in app stores due to their popularity, what skills do they purport to teach, and with which strategies? Are parents likely to encounter the same apps if they looked at expert review sites like Common Sense Media or Children’s Technology Review to guide their choices, or would the language and literacy apps promoted by these experts in the field have different attributes?

We started by collecting the 50 most popular paid and free apps in the education sections of three app stores—iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon apps—over eight weeks in February and March of 2014. From the full list of 1,200 titles identified through this scan process we then identified those apps that were (1) intended for children birth through age 8 years, and (2) focused at least in part on teaching language and literacy skills (based on their descriptions in the app stores. Finally, we obtained lists of highly rated or recognized apps from the Children’s Technology Review, Common Sense Media, and Parents’ Choice Awards. From these three lists, we pulled out 57 additional apps intended for children ages birth through 8 years and targeting language and literacy skills (per their description) to add to our sample, yielding a total sample of 183 apps.

Our coding process includes two phases. In the first phase we are recording numerous aspects of the way each app is presented and described in the app stores, such as the size of the app, the language/literacy skills it claims to teach, and whether it features popular, branded characters. The second phase involves downloading all of the apps in order to directly observe features of the app content, like bi-lingual functions and information provided to parents and educators within the app.

Some early insights

Our coding is currently well underway, and we are excited to have some early insights to share regarding the subset of the most popular paid apps (n = 66). Here are three interesting trends within this subsample and their possible implications.

Finding 1: Language/literacy-focused apps for kids are among the most popular paid educational apps

First, you may be wondering how we arrived at the number 66 for this subset. Here’s what we did: One day a week over an eight-week period, we recorded the titles of the apps that appeared in the top 50 on that day in the educational section of each of the 3 app stores. So that’s 50 paid educational apps x 3 app stores x 8 weeks, which led to a list of 1,200 apps. A lot of those were repeats (apps were often in the top 50 a few weeks in a row). The sample we coded consists of the 66 distinct paid language/literacy apps for kids within the full list of 1,200 apps.

To get a sense of the overall proportion of popular paid apps that are language/literacy focused apps for kids we looked back at the original list of 1,200 apps, with duplicates and all. Of this full list, 447 (37.3%) were intended for children eight years old or younger and claimed to teach one or more language/literacy skills such as alphabet recognition or spelling. Of the 447 language/literacy apps, there were 66 unique titles over the eight-week collection period (that is, 381 of the language/literacy apps were reappearances of those 66 apps in different markets and over different weeks). It is clear that language/literacy apps that become especially popular tend to remain among the most popular educational titles for at least several weeks.

Because our sampling and coding techniques are not identical to those used for the 2012 report we cannot directly compare findings; for example, the Amazon app store was not included in the 2012 analysis. But we can say that from 2012 to 2014, it seems the number of language/literacy paid Google Play¹ apps has increased, but decreased for the iTunes paid apps.

Looking within our 2014 sample. Amazon has a higher percentage of apps in the top 50 lists that are for children in our age range and focused on language/literacy skills (43.3 percent), compared to iTunes and Google Play.

Finding 2: Although they are often available across stores, paid language/literacy apps that make it into the list of “top 50 most popular educational apps” in one store are rarely listed in the top 50 of another store.

Our analysis suggests that language/literacy-focused app producers make their apps available through multiple sites, as 79 percent of our sample was available in more than one app store. However, the majority of apps in our paid sample (75 percent) were found among the top 50 most popular educational apps in only one app store over the course of eight weeks. We speculate that app producers prioritize one store over the others when promoting their apps, or that the algorithms for determining the most popular apps vary across stores. Another intriguing possibility is that parents who use different app stores may also end up searching for different items based on how the app store itself is structured. Of note is the fact that apps listed as “most popular” in a store are much more likely to be downloaded by more people than apps that are not featured.^{2 3} Thus, apps that are already ranked highly may stay in the top spots for much longer and hold onto coveted promotional space that other apps have difficulty obtaining.

Finding 3: Many apps still target basic language/literacy skills, although more advanced skills are notably more common than two years ago

In the case of the particular language and literacy skills mentioned in the app developers’ descriptions, we have begun to document a shifting landscape among the most popular paid apps. Across both time points, basic language/literacy skills, such as alphabet knowledge and phonemic awareness, are commonly targeted by popular paid apps (as described in the app descriptions). However, our analysis reveals a trend towards promoting more advanced literacy skills, as more advanced skills like vocabulary development and reading comprehension are increasingly targeted by popular language/literacy apps for children eight years old and younger. As shown in the charts below, this shift is particularly pronounced within the iTunes store. Though this analysis does not verify or test the content within the apps, it appears that, when taken together, the products in the app store reflect a more comprehensive range of skills that contribute to children’s reading success compared to just a few years ago.

Widening the lens: Stay tuned for more analyses

These are just a few highlights that represent a small portion of our full analysis, which in turn, represents a snapshot of particular features within a limited subset of the full universe of children’s apps. Of note is the fact that many different kinds of apps, even those which do not claim to specifically teach language/literacy skills, may be helpful for children’s reading and language development. Still, even if these findings cannot chart the route for parents and educators, they can at least give us a better sense of the map itself. By compiling and parsing the information that producers divulge about their language-literacy-focused apps, as well as various aspects of the apps’ contents, we hope to provide a clearer picture of the landscape to parents and educators in the driver’s seat of young children’s routes to reading and language development. In coming weeks, we will be sharing additional insights from our paid, free, and top-rated app samples. A book based on Seeding Reading, to be published in 2015, will describe our methodology and complete findings in more detail.

¹ At the time of the 2012 data collection this app store was transitioning from the title “Android Market” to it’s current title, “Google Play.” We refer to it as Google Play for clarify and consistency with the 2014 sample.
² See Garg, R., & Telang, R. (2013). Inferring app demand from publicly available data. MIS Quarterly, 37(4), 1253-1264.
³Shuler, C., Levine, Z., & Ree, J. (2012, January). iLearn II: An analysis of the education category of Apple’s app store. In New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.

Part 15 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning.

Most people agree that implementing game-based learning makes sense for older students, but what about really young kids? Do screens have a place in early childhood education? How young is too young for screen time? If you have small children, you know that this is a hot topic among new parents. Some moms and dads believe that screen time will ruin their children. Others see tablets as an exceptional parenting gadget, a tool that can teach, distract, and educate.

Laurie Sullivan

The American Academy Of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends that children younger than two years old have no screen time at all. Infants probably get more than enough screen time already, just being pushed in a stroller through the electronics aisle at Target or peaking over their parents’ shoulders. For older kids, AAP suggests one to two hours per day of electronic media. In addition, the AAP encourages parents to “establish ‘screen-free’ zones at home by making sure there are no televisions, computers or video games in children’s bedrooms, and by turning off the TV during dinner.”

But reducing the issue to an on/off switch oversimplifies things. When we understand the question of electronic media in such a polarized way, we are caught in the same way of thinking that can make screen time problematic. Tablets become like junk food, imagined as a temptation that children gravitate to but need to be protected from. On the contrary, it is only when electronic media is used to occupy children — like a babysitter that provides parents or teachers with an hour or two of peace and quiet — that justifying its use becomes more complicated.

Videos can often carry the same baggage. We sometimes think that the motivation for showing the class a movie is that the teacher’s too busy to properly plan for the day. Or maybe when the teacher needs an extra hour for grading and preparation, a documentary can keep the students occupied. Of course, this is not always the case. There are certainly good pedagogical reasons to use video content in class.

Likewise, there are good pedagogical reasons to use video games and other electronic media in early childhood education. It is not about employing ed-tech for its own sake — as if gadgets automatically make things more innovative or somehow  better — but rather about using tools that engage students toward specific learning objectives. Simply avoiding apps because of some nostalgia for a bygone era may cause educators to miss valuable early academic opportunities. The real question is not whether or not technology belongs in early childhood education, but rather, how can we leverage the efficiency of digital tools to best serve young learners.

It needs to happen carefully. Although the iOS and Android app stores are both full of content labeled as educational, it is not all good content. Let us look specifically at early literacy. Many apps drill and practice letter recognition and sounds, but few are grounded in good pedagogical practices. Lisa Guernsey and Michael Levine wrote in Slate: “Most of the top-selling reading apps appear to teach only the most basic of literacy skills. They lean toward easy-to-teach tasks, such as identifying the ABCs, but don’t address higher-level competencies that young children also need to become strong readers, such as developing vocabulary and understanding words in a narrative.” Just adding the alphabet to popular games like Angry Birds or Temple Run might make parents more willing to whip out their credit cards, but it won’t necessarily teach their children how to read. Good early childhood literacy options tend to blur the distinction between “game” and “app,” often looking more like apps than like traditional video games.

Seeding Reading: Investing in Children’s Literacy in a Digital Age is a new series from New America’s Education Policy Program and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. The series (which has only just begun) looks at “early education and parenting initiatives that are harnessing new technologies.” It will also scrutinize “the marketplace of digital ‘reading’ products.” And bring information and analysis about “research that may illuminate how communications technologies and digital media are affecting the learning of reading, the act of reading, and the reading brain, in both good ways and bad.” This will become a valuable resource for early childhood educators that want to explore using games and apps in their classroom.

In the meantime, there are already some great apps out there. Learn With Homer, for example, is an iPad app created by Stephanie Dua, a well-known education reformer. It provides a comprehensive contextualized literacy curriculum. “I know there’s a lot of great research on how to teach children to read,” says Dua. “But when my own daughter wanted to learn, I couldn’t find any suitable materials for parents. That’s when Learn with Homer was born. It brings the best early learning techniques together in one app.”

Learn With Homer does some of the same things a good kindergarten or pre-school teacher would. It is interdisciplinary in that it “combines learning to read with learning to understand the world.” What does that mean? Kids are not only learning what the letter “A” sounds like and that “alligator” starts with “A,” but also taking virtual “field trips” to the zoo, where they learn about alligators. They also draw pictures, record their own voice discussing the subject matter, listen to stories, and play mini games that emphasize the letters, sounds, and ideas.

In addition, there are less comprehensive options: apps and games that can supplement the great non-digital learning that’s already happening in early childhood education. For example, ScratchJr is an iPad app from MIT’s Media Lab that lets 5-7 year-olds create games and stories using a simple drag and drop interface that is designed to provide the foundation for learning computer coding. Most of us consider coding to be part of computer science, but it is also a form of expression. It reminds us that the distinction between STEM and ELA is an arbitrary and often superficial one. Mitchel Resnick, head of MIT Media Labs Lifelong Kindergarten Research Group and one of the creators of Scratch and ScratchJr, says, “When people learn to write, they can share their ideas with the rest of the world. So too with coding.” Good kindergarten teachers understand that for young students, literacy is as much about creating a love of formal self-expression and articulation as it is about learning to write letters on lined paper. Both are necessary.

Kindoma is another interesting app. It combines video conferencing, screen sharing, and reading into a single app. It was design with grandparents or traveling parents in mind. The idea was that you do not need to be right next to the child in order to both enjoy reading together. But there could also be many great classroom applications for this app. Imagine a fantastic twist on penpals. Kindergarten teachers could partner with other classrooms in other parts of the city, other states, even on opposite sides of the country. Students could have online reading buddies through Kindoma. Creative teachers will imagine tons of innovative ways to use this platform.

There are plenty of games aimed at younger kids that can be part of a balanced approach to technology in early childhood education. Check out games by Toca Boca, Toontastic, or Motion Math. Imagine ways to let these games supplement and enhance your well-worn curriculum.

It’s especially important in a digitally connected world where everything is always on that we start teaching children the importance of text, language, and expression as early as possible. With so many options for stimulation and entertainment, it is all too easy to imagine a generation of children that grow up believing that YouTube videos replace books. One is not an alternative to the other; they are two different types of communication.

Using games and apps not only offers engaging opportunities for young students to acquire important academic skills, it also teaches those students to associate screens with refined cognitive skills. It reinforces the idea that screens are more than just distraction machines. Early education should provide a foundation for critical thinking, including thinking critically about technology and digital media.

The MindShift Guide to Games and Learning is made possible through the generous support of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and is a project of the Games and Learning Publishing Council.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center needs your vote for the SXSW Interactive 2015 conference! We have pulled together heavy hitters from LEGO, Nickelodeon, and MIT Media Lab to talk about how the engaging power of games can be used to promote playful learning. The design experts will share lessons learned from applying the latest research to produce transformative AND popular games. Vote for our panel if you want to hear their best practices for such integral processes like research gathering, iterative design and user feedback. For more information, please see our Panel Picker voting page! http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/39174

Part 14 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning.

If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that today’s technologies will one day be obsolete — we shouldn’t be too enamored with any particular educational tool. Teachers will always play the most important role in the classroom.

NASA

Although ed-tech has a lot to offer, even the most interactive, adaptive software cannot provide the social and emotional benefits that a good teacher can. Early psychoanalytic research already made it clear at the beginning of the 20th century: the relationship between developing children and adult figures is important. Good teachers (especially in the younger grades) understand that they are responsible not only for transmitting new ideas and information, but also for creating a collaborative classroom structure that models, reinforces, and encourages positive social behaviors.

Teaching and learning are not simply about academic content and retention. Don’t imagine game-based learning as an innovative content distribution system. Instead, imagine it as a way to move out of a high-stakes testing mentality and away from a top-down pedagogy. Because they present content in context, video games encourage students to understand knowledge not as data to be downloaded into a biological hard drive, but rather as the collective wisdom that enables one thing to interact with another in meaningful ways.

Of course, such a lofty goal cannot be accomplished with video games alone. It will also require that teachers work directly with students. It requires that teachers move away from standardization and meet each student as a unique individual. The best learning happens when we abandon the “sage on the stage” classroom model and leave behind our reliance on set curricula. When education becomes rigidly homogenized, the change in student body from year to year, or semester to semester, is tantamount to kids taking turns playing an algorithmically predetermined arcade game.

Although many people worry that game-based learning will lead to an increasingly standardized pedagogy, the best implementations do the exact opposite. They make differentiated instruction easier and more efficient. Teachers can use games as a supplement that enables increased one-on-one learning between teacher and student.

I visited one kindergarten classroom where ST Math was part of the curriculum. The kids called it Jiji math because of the adorable animated penguin. Jiji the penguin is not only the ST Math mascot, but also a critical part of the program’s pedagogy. Created by the MIND Research Institute, ST (spatial temporal) Math offers a playful game-based program that teaches mathematical concepts without using words.

ST Math has all the bells and whistles of cutting-edge software but it is not revolutionary. That is, despite being digital, it remains grounded in three classic principles of good teaching: interactivity, informative feedback, and intrinsic motivation. I spoke to the company’s founder, Dr. Matthew Peterson, to understand how these three principles work in practice.

1. Interactivity. Learning needs to be a dialogue. The child needs to come before the curriculum. At the same time, learning needs to be interactive because, as Dr. Peterson explains, “they need to own their own solutions.” That’s why multiple choice doesn’t work; it puts assessment before learning. If the student doesn’t generate his or her own answers, the quality of retention is severely debilitated.

2. Informative feedback. Obviously video games and computer software offer substantially more opportunities for interactivity than the old fashioned textbook, or even the supplemental workbooks. But the majority of educational games are simply electronic tests with animated gold stars and smiley faces.They lack informative feedback, which is different from simple rewards because it is transformational rather than transactional. Unlike points and grades, which simply tell students whether they’re right or wrong, informative feedback provides instant explanations about why an answer is right or wrong. ST Math uses Jiji to provide informative feedback. When the answer is right the penguin can move across the screen; when it’s wrong, he can’t.

3. Intrinsic motivation. When informative feedback works, students are no longer motivated by transactional rewards. Instead, they are intrinsically motivated to solve the problems, not to pass the test. Dr. Peterson explains this using the example of the Rubik’s Cube. The classic puzzle toy has nothing to do with gold stars, nor smiley faces, nor coins. Instead, one twists the cube because of the pure intrinsic pleasure you get from seeing all the colors line up.

ST Math combines instruction, practice, and assessment so that they’re always happening simultaneously, and it can be used even in classrooms with few computers. In the kindergarten classroom I visited, there were only four laptops. They were set up at a table near the “cozy corner.” This was just one station in a room full of math themed choices. There were manipulatives at another table. Worksheets and art supplies at others.

The students were lively. Some were following instructions with the manipulatives. Some were tracing numbers on worksheets. Some were drawing number-themed pictures. And some were playing “Jiji Math” at the table of laptop computers.

So how does the teacher incorporate the games into the curriculum? “Video games allow me to keep some students working on academic content while I give other students personal attention,” said Lisa Pack, the classroom teacher. She made her rounds, moving from one station to another, giving focused attention to each student that wasn’t working with Jiji. Then, after 15 or 20 minutes, she rotated some students off Jiji and moved others on. She immediately worked with the students who had been working with Jiji and then she continued to make rounds of the room. Sometimes she worked directly with groups of students, other times with individuals.

It was clear that she knew exactly what each student needed and was able to provide it in an individual way. ST Math was like a classroom assistant. It wasn’t doing the teaching, but rather reinforcing the concepts that had already been taught. The games were classroom management tools, providing engaging practice for some students while she worked with others. They enabled more personalized face-to-face instruction by making it more efficient.

In many of the classrooms I visit, digital games are being used in the same way. They’re just one activity in a room full of diverse learning options. When thinking about game-based learning, we don’t always have to imagine the games at the center of the classroom. The games can belong on the margins, supplementing everyday teaching practices and providing the tools that enable differentiated instruction.

The MindShift Guide to Games and Learning is made possible through the generous support of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and is a project of the Games and Learning Publishing Council.

Einstein put it best: We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. The world’s most beloved genius reminds us that it doesn’t take a genius to graduate beyond the state of being stumped. It only takes an earnestly dogged jury-rigger.

Martha White’s Time Magazine article, “The Real Reason College Grads Can’t Get Hired,” reports the widely-held managerial observation that young job applicants either haven’t been born or bred to think critically and solve problems. In the crush to populate the workforce with technical proficiency, we’ve created a generation of people who think properly, but who don’t know how to think fast.

It’s a discrepancy that’s created a youth unemployment crisis—the International Labour Organization notes that young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults, and almost 73 million young people worldwide are without work. The World Economic Forum concluded that a staggering 40% of the world’s unemployed are youth, and McKinsey & Company forecasts that by 2020, we will face a shortfall of up to 85 million skilled workers.

No wonder we’ve gotten into this conundrum. We’ve been busy. As technology’s expansion has shrunk the world, we’ve restructured our global economy to focus less on manufactured goods and more on the “products” of service and knowledge. We have armed upcoming workers with the organizational principles, employment patterns, and competitive advantage to cope quite precisely with this near-frantic pace of change. Except now, the resulting shortfall of problem-solvers needs problem-solvers, for whom precision is less important than savvy and instinct.

Wherefore art thou, problem-solvers?

Beyond West Coast Design & Research Jam

Not surprisingly, what young people want from employers doesn’t always line up with what companies want from employees. Everyone wants dream jobs (and dream teams)—is it possible for us to grant both those wishes in one fell swoop?

First, let’s get radical—at least relatively speaking. Our collective temperature has not been conducive to truly open thought, outlook, and potential in recent days. Headmaster Richard Cairns of Brighton College offers a philosophy that’s a first step: he describes a curriculum in which all students study Mandarin, girls play cricket, and boys practice dance as an education that encouraged students to be “first-class versions of themselves rather than second-class versions of someone else.”

The same is true of the job market. As the job-for-life concept has faded, so too has the tedium of career monogamy. It’s good news that international competition has intensified. A wealth of complexity means a wealth of opportunities—if fresh-faced graduates are to dive in and succeed, they’ll need us to first help them appreciate the formative value of the periodic bunglings, misfires, and failures that accompany radical forward movement.

Say what you want about intellect, training, or experiential chops: put simply, innovators are hackers. It’s not a set of specialized skills, and not even a particular affinity for technology. A hacker’s mind germinates with soft attributes: curiosity, mischief, and a shruggy attitude to the inevitable falling-down in the doing of grand adventure. Like when we were young.

Every young person is equal-parts scientist, magician, and engineer. They pull things apart to discover something new because they know better than any academic that when we tinker, we learn. They ask questions out loud and to no one at all. They find order in mess, chaos in tidy. They practice the art of unstructured invention five times before lunch. It’s the LEGO way.

Beyond’s recent West Coast Research & Design Jam—a lab designed for the study and appreciation of our Junior Prototypers—was a mosh pit of kid-led creation. We had them digging through raw materials, prototyping ideas, testing hypotheses and brainstorming improvements. As they jammed and borrowed and jury-rigged, we all chatted about what it might all mean. The future! The past! Hopes, dreams, wishes. And as they tend to do (if adults take a moment to listen), the kids were shockingly astute.

They told us that they’re not considering their future in specific ways, at least not beyond the standard-issue enthusiasm for space travel. They told us about the general effect they seek, which was definitive: happiness. Because happiness makes peace, and peace makes more happiness. And so on.

We need more of this shocking, childlike optimism. And we need to retain it into adulthood. On top of it, let’s stack a healthy dose of something commonly referred to as grit. Persistence is the cornerstone of a hacking mindset. After all, it wasn’t inspiration that drove me to stay up past midnight pecking away at code to nail the syntax for more complex programs. It was pure doggedness. Hackers are not only unafraid of mistakes—they’re unafraid of repeated mistakes. With every iteration comes the kind of discovery that you just can’t plot in advance. The broader our individual knowledge base of what works and what doesn’t, the broader our future product or system.

We need to play with the status quo, pushing past the educational baseline of literacy, numeracy, and IT. At Beyond, our mission is to do just that—to bring grown-ups, institutions, and ideas together with the purpose of protecting and extending the innate curiosity of youth. This is how we’ll populate our workforce with the hackers and innovators we need to solve our biggest problems.

We need more than competency. We need a whole new agenda in which parents, schools, communities make sure that the entertainments, learning structures, and facilities that swirl around our youth are wide open, with plenty of space (and a cheering section) for new ideas. Einstein himself would approve.

Watch Beyond CEO Lital Marom speak at PechaKucha Vancouver about how hacking can foster young people’s creative confidence, and help them move beyond limiting narratives for a bright, re-engineered future. Follow along by subscribing to Beyond’s Facebook page. If you’re an educator or developer interested in creating new learning models and experiences we would love to talk to you. Get in touch at reach@wemovebeyond.com. 

This post is part of Seeding Reading, series of articles and analysis by New America’s Ed Policy Program and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. See also the Learning Tech section of EdCentral.org and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center blog.

It may sound strange to put the word “technology” in the same sentence as home-visiting programs for mothers, infants, and toddlers, but over the past few years, many of these early childhood programs have started using new forms of multimedia and digital tools to engage parents. Their success could open up new ways of thinking about technology to promote the early cognitive and social skills in children that lead to reading proficiency and a host of other positive results.

For those new to home visiting initiatives, a quick primer: These are programs designed to boost children’s health and development by assisting low-income and first-time mothers. Nurses or social workers go to the homes of pregnant women and mothers who have signed up, providing them with advice about parenting and connecting them to resources to help their babies thrive. The Affordable Care Act heightened attention to home visiting in 2010 by creating a federal funding stream for home visiting programs under its Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program, which has served about 15,000 families to date. In March 2014, the federal government extended funding through March 2015, building on the initial $1.5 billion investment.

The impact of home-visiting programs can vary widely, depending on program design and target.  A 2009 review of nine home-visiting programs by Kimberly Howard and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn in the journal Future of Children found that programs that target child abuse and neglect, for example, often are less likely to see immediate results than programs that seek to improve mother-child bonding or other parenting practices that affect child development.  The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) also published a series of policy briefs on home visitation, including how to implement evidence-based programs and how to reach disadvantaged families.

As part of the MIECHV program, the Department of Health and Human Services in 2010 created criteria for deeming programs “effective” and therefore eligible for the new federal funding. (Here’s a handy table – part of a significant new report on federal home visiting – that shows the 14 programs that currently meet the mark.)

You may be wondering: What is the link between home visiting and children learning to read? Part of it is rooted in research showing that the way parents interact with their children can have a huge bearing on children’s language development — and that language development is inextricably tied to reading success.  Research shows that if problems are caught early, interventions can help to keep children on track. All of the MIECHV-funded programs, according to a new government report, use a screening tool known as the Ages and Stages Questionnaire to help determine whether young children might be experiencing delays in speaking and communicating,

Another key piece of evidence for this link comes from an oft-cited study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley that showed that by age 4, children in low-income families have heard 30 million fewer words than higher-income children. This “word gap” and the home literacy environment, other studies have shown, can help explain the enduring gap in educational achievement between high- and low-income children that persists as they grow up. (The “word gap” has gained prominence as a theme in early education over the past year, in no small part due to the attention of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Too Small to Fail initiative, which we’ve followed since last summer.)

Flickr/ Melanie Holtsman

Recognizing the importance of language development, many home visiting programs explicitly encourage parents to converse with and read books with their babies – behaviors that can seem counterintuitive given that the children are too young to talk back.

This is where new technologies are starting to play a role.  It’s not always clear whether parents are gaining anything from lectures or printed handouts from professionals, even if that advice is distributed in the comfortable environment of their homes. So home visiting programs are trying out new forms of outreach using technology to show instead of tell. DVDs, for example, have been employed for years to provide parents with tips and techniques for promoting their children’s development.

A Texas-based program called Play and Learn Strategies (PALS), takes video to another level by employing hand-held video recorders to capture moments between parents and children. Home visitors and mothers view those moments at home together to open up dialogue about what why children respond in various ways depending on how their parents communicate with them.  Several years’ worth of studies by Susan H. Landry, director of the Children’s Learning Institute at the University of Texas’ Health Sciences Center in Houston, have shown a positive impact on children’s early literacy skills.  [Seeding Reading will feature an in-depth look at PALS later this summer.]

Another example comes in our post last month about the use of a tiny recording device known as LENA, for Language ENvironment Analysis, to help parents see how simple, back-and-forth conversations with their children could help them build their language and vocabulary skills. LENA is being used by the Thirty Million Words initiative  — an 8-week home-visiting program underway in Chicago. (Thirty Million Words is not one of the programs currently receiving MIECHV funds.)

Shurand Adams, 24, is one of the parents in Thirty Million Words. Interviewed for our Seeding Reading project, Adams said she enrolled to give her daughter Teshiya, 19 months old at the time, every possible advantage.  “I didn’t know a child’s most crucial time in learning is from birth until 5 years old,” Adams said. “I knew you could start at home doing little things, but I thought the learning was from teachers. They’re trained to do that. I didn’t feel like I had the ability.”

Dana Suskind, a pediatric specialist at the University of Chicago who specializes in speech and hearing loss, directs Thirty Million Words and is leading a research team evaluating its effectiveness. Early results in a yet-to-be-published study show that parents in the treatment group, like Adams, showed a significant increase in understanding how children’s language develops and spoke more words to their children. While the increase is notable, the effects had faded when the researchers retested the families four months later, perhaps because the program was only eight weeks. The study was also small—only 23 families—making it hard to tell whether the families that volunteered for the program were somehow different from those in the control group in ways that could affect outcomes. The team is planning a second randomized, controlled trial involving 200 families with toddlers approximately 15 months old in 2015.

In yet another example, a new program run by Parents as Teachers (PAT), a home visiting program based in St. Louis, MO, will test whether online question-and-answer sessions could help to extend the reach of home visiting.  Parents as Teachers launched a series of Google Helpouts this summer to answer parents’ questions via online hangouts with a professional. These Helpouts use Google’s Hangout software to connect people in an online video chat at specific times of the day – such as 2 pm ET on a Monday – when they can have real-time conversations about topics as varied as sleep schedules and child nutrition. While the Helpouts do not yet delve into language development specifically, they will be worth watching to see how parents use them, what barriers arise (do parents have enough Internet connectivity at home or on their smart phones?), and whether similar high-tech, high-touch approaches can lead parents to feel more empowered to foster their children’s development.

Given the potential of home visiting programs in supporting language and literacy development, Seeding Reading will continue to zoom in on how and where new tools could help provide resources and training to parents, educators, and caregivers. We’d love to hear your take. If you know of initiatives using media and technology tools in new ways, please jump in with comments about your experiences, pros and cons.

Lisa Guernsey is Director of the Learning Technologies Project and Director of the Early Education Initiative in New America’s Education Policy Program.

Barbara Ray contributed to this report.