Family Time with Apps is a free interactive guide for parents and caregivers that highlights some ways that families can use technology together. The book features comic strips that parents and children can enjoy together, as well as tips on selecting apps that can help turn screen time into family time. The guide provides tips on how using apps together can support a child’s learning and development. It is available from the iBook Store.

This week, Jason Boog, author of “Born Reading” shares some tips on preparing kids for new experiences, with technology and without.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center asked me to write about the “Preparing for New Experiences” section of its free interactive book about Family Time with Apps. This was one of my favorite sections in the handbook, because I truly believe that apps can help parents and caregivers guide kids through many major life steps.

While writing my book, Born Reading: Bringing Up Bookworms in a Digital Age, I discovered scores of apps perfectly suited for these life journeys and shared them all with my daughter—especially during a particular rite of passage that all children must go through.

Among all the daunting new experiences that parents and kids face during the first five years of life, potty training is one of the most difficult and potentially traumatic—for everybody involved! The process of potty training requires weeks of patience, and the physical process needs to be reinforced every couple hours for months for the activity to sink in properly. So this is the perfect time to use ALL the tools at your disposal to prepare your child for potty training: read books together, download great apps, learn some catchy songs, and play games with stuffed animals.

My daughter read Potty Time with Elmo over and over when potty training time arrived. Whenever Olive loves a book, I go looking for apps, music, or audiobooks to expand the adventure.  I downloaded the “Potty Time with Elmo” app on my iPad to complement the reading experience. She loved how the app turned a familiar book into an interactive experience with toilet flushes, faucet splashes, and conversation with the lovable (and eventually, somewhat annoying) Sesame Street character. For parents looking for more potty training support on digital devices, I also recommend the Once Upon a Potty app based on Alona Frankel’s classic book.

We tried to keep Olive’s overall screen time limited, but we let her use these two apps every day.  Potty training was a great opportunity to use books and apps together. Besides these apps, we kept a big stack of books in the bathroom:  Once Upon a Potty by Alona Frankel, Potty by Leslie Patricelli, and It’s Potty Time by Roger Priddy. The Priddy book actually comes with a magnetic calendar to track a child’s good days during potty training. Using little tricks like these, you can make print books just as interactive as an app.

To this day, I am still haunted by snatches of songs or slogans from our multimedia potty training adventure. Eventually, the activity becomes a part of daily life and you can put those materials away for good.

These techniques work in every corner of life. The Family Time with Apps guide outlines a crucial idea for parents: “New experiences like the first day of school, first plane trip or first haircut can be scary for a child. Playing a game related to the activity or creating a photo album can help children imagine, talk about, and prepare for what will happen.”

This is fantastic advice, but parents need to remember one thing: none of this amazing learning will happen without your support! As the cartoon illustrates so well, parents should sit with a child, exploring apps together whenever they can.

Too often, we think of tablets and smartphones as passive devices, digital babysitters to fill solitary moments in our kids’ lives. But apps work best when used in an interactive experience, shared between child and caregiver.

For instance, there are many apps that will teach your child how to help out around the kitchen, but they all require lots of practice and adult participation—both inside and outside the app.

We gave my daughter an amazing Julia Child enhanced e-book, complete with video excerpts from the beloved television show. Olive would spend all of her limited iPad time scrolling through recipes and videos. Inside the app, she watched that charming lady cook giant turkeys, legs of lamb, and a mouthwatering chocolate cake.

We also spent a lot of time playing with Toca Boca’s Toca Kitchen apps (both one and two have provided hours of entertainment). These apps let kids play with virtual kitchen tools like blenders, knives and juicers—creating play meals to feed to characters inside the game.

To make the most of this interest, we augmented her beloved app with some hands-on kitchen experience. I loved to watch the videos with Olive, asking questions about the recipes and discovering her favorite dishes. We used Julia Child’s recipes to expand the experience into real life. Even though she was only three years old at the time, the app inspired my daughter to help bake bread, tarts, cakes, cupcakes, cinnamon rolls.

Olive is four and a half now, and she loves to help out in the kitchen—cooking, setting the table or clearing the dishes after a meal. Julia Child helped my whole family learn a little bit more about cooking together, and showed my daughter how to participate in every part of the kitchen experience.

Finally, I always recommend Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood for parents embarking on new experiences with a child. This gentle PBS show began in 2012, continuing the legacy and characters from Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. A whole generation of parents and kids will always remember Daniel’s simple lessons about good manners, doctor visits, babysitters, sharing with friends, and the first day of school.

The Daniel Tiger team also has plenty of app content to supplement the show. If there is a particular new experience coming up in your child’s life, visit the PBS Kids app to find Daniel Tiger clips about it. The show’s growing archive covers most new experiences that a kid might face.

Daniel Tiger’s Day and Night is my favorite: an app that lets kids rehearse going to bed, going to school and other common routines. New experiences require tons of practice for kids, and these apps provide a gentle environment for that play. The Daniel Tiger’s Grr-ific Feelings app focuses on helping kids express their feelings, but it also includes 18 songs from the show. Finally, the Play at Home with Daniel app lets kids revisit key moments from the show about doctor visits, musical playtime, emotions, and other great topics, literally exploring Daniel’s home in the process.

What new experiences is your child excited about? What new experiences is your child nervous about?  Let your kid guide your book and app searches in the future, and enjoy the new apps together.

These interactive and shared experiences will make new experiences less daunting and more fun for everybody.

 

Full disclosure: I have written for the PBS Parents website in the past.   

 

Jason Boog spent five years as the editor of Mediabistro’s publishing blog, GalleyCat. His writing has appeared at NPR Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Peace Corps Writers, and Salon.

 

 

We recently released Family Time with Apps: A Guide to Using Apps with Your Kids, a free interactive guide for parents and caregivers. The book features comic strips that parents and children can enjoy together, as well as tips on selecting apps that can help turn screen time into family time. The guide provides tips on how using apps together can support a child’s learning and development. It is available from the iBook Store.

We’re thrilled to continue our blog series on sharing screen time as a family with this post by Jeana Lee Tahnk of Top Tech Mom.

 

My kids are so lucky. Not only because they have my husband and me as parents (ha), but because they have the luxury of all their immediate family members within driving distance. Grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles are around for family gatherings, holidays and birthday celebrations. Certainly a luxury I didn’t grow up with.

My nuclear family consisted of my parents and sister and me, but the rest of my extended family resided in Seoul, allowing for once-a-year visits to our house (if that) and infrequent phone conversations. I vividly recall the practice of dialing a bunch of numbers, waiting for an operator to patch us through and then trying to decipher the few Korean words I understood through a very scratchy connection.

Boy times have changed.

Although both my husband’s and my families live nearby, we aren’t actually able see each other very frequently. Between after school activities and back-to-back sports on the weekends, we are not able to take advantage of their proximity as much as we’d like to. But that’s where technology comes into play very nicely.

Thanks to the magic of tech essentials like FaceTime, Skype and Kakao Talk, the kids are able to see and communicate with their grandparents several times a week, show off the latest musical masterpieces they’re working on, the school project on Barack Obama, the front teeth finally growing in, and so much more. The familiar ring of FaceTime has become gospel in our house, with the kids running to answer the phone and give updates on how their days are going.

And I know that the joy is reciprocated on the other end as well. The grandparents love participating in the kids’ daily lives, even the mundane, “What are you having for dinner?” conversations.

It’s funny because as of Christmas 2013, my parents had no “i” devices—email and Google searches were just about the extent of their tech knowledge. But a gift of an iPod Touch for the holidays was the catalyst for their tech immersion and adoption, one that my sister and I never expected. Our original intent was to create a digital repository of all their music, but never did we think that they’d become so adept with the other tech features the iPod has to offer. These are people who turn off their cell phones to save battery life after they call us, so can you blame us?

My mom in particular was just in awe of the technology that was available to her. Speaking commands to Google, finding old French chansons on YouTube, and most excitingly, FaceTime-ing with the grandkids, made them instant converts. She now responds to texts faster than a teenager and makes very good use of the world of emoticons available to her. And this is where technology has become a real blessing.

Because of FaceTime, the kids are able to talk to their grandparents several times a week. Because of Instagram, I’m able to see photos of my cousin’s newborn baby every day. Because of Kakao Talk, the kids are able to leave audio messages—for free—to their far-away second cousins and great aunts.

As someone who writes about technology and is immersed in it myself, I often struggle with how to integrate technology into my kids’ lives in a safe and healthy way. It will still be a while before my kids own their own “i” devices, and an even longer while before they’re telling me about the latest apps du jour that they’re using with their friends. Before that stage of digital parenting comes into play, I will continue to wholeheartedly embrace this kind of technology for making connections with family that will last a lifetime.

 

Jeana Lee Tahnk, the Top Tech Mom, is an experienced, reliable, trustworthy source to guide parents on the top products and safest ways to integrate technology into their families’ lives. As a mom of three herself, she is also navigating a new world of parenting and wants to share her knowledge with curious parents. She is a regular contributor to Mashable, The Huffington Post, and Parenting.com, and has shared her tech commentary in The New York Times, NPR, CBC Radio, as well as NBC, ABC and CBS affiliates around the country.

 

We are proud to announce a brand new fellows program at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. Unlike the Center’s traditional Fellowship, which is annually awarded to early-career investigators, the Cooney Center Senior Fellowship program honors individuals for their past contributions as well as ongoing collaborations with the Cooney Center. Drs. Vikki Katz, and Sarah Vaala, and Jason Yip—all of whom are no strangers to the Cooney Center and its mission—have been selected as inaugural Senior Fellows for the Spring 2015 – Winter 2016 term. Please join us in congratulating Vikki, Sarah, and Jason and read more below about how each will work with the Cooney Center in the year ahead.

Vikki Katz

Vikki Katz, PhD, is a senior research associate at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on Latino families and how they engage each other and technology for different kinds of activities. She is currently partnering with the JGCC to explore—using both interview and survey methods—how low-income Latino families make decisions about adopting broadband and digital technologies that are offered through digital equity initiatives, to establish how these can be better leveraged for learning gains. This research is being generously funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Her work has been published in a number of journals, including Journal of Children and Media, Journal of Communication and Journal of Information Policy. Her book, Kids in the Middle, examines the roles that children of immigrants play in their families’ social integration by brokering language, culture, and media content(Rutgers University Press). She also co-authored Understanding Ethnic Media (Sage Publications).

Dr. Katz holds a B.A. from UCLA and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where she also held an Annenberg Foundation postdoctoral fellowship for two years. You can learn more about her work at vikkikatz.com.

 

Sarah Vaala

Sarah Vaala, PhD, served as the 2011-2012 Joan Ganz Cooney Center research fellow, after completing her doctorate in Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.  During her fellowship she conducted research regarding parent-child co-reading of e-books, as well as parents’ perceptions of these tools relative to traditional books.  She also helped to organize a conference of leading scholars, educators, policy-makers, and producers to discuss how and in what contexts US Hispanic families are communicating with and learning from digital technologies.

Sarah has remained a research associate with the Cooney Center since completing her fellowship.  She also completed an academic post-doctoral research fellowship at the Annenberg Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, where she continued to study children’s media environments and factors that impact parents’ decision-making about children’s media use.

Currently, Sarah is a research associate at the Vanderbilt University School of Nursing.  She is helping to design and test multi-media tools that assist youth with type 1 diabetes in overcoming challenges related to following their medical regimen.  In her work with the Cooney Center she is leading a market scan and content analysis of language- and literacy-focused apps for children ages birth through eight years.

Jason Yip

Jason Yip, PhD, is an assistant professor of digital youth at The Information School at the University of Washington, Seattle. His research focuses on how the design and implementation of new learning technologies can support participatory learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) between children and families.

Jason was the Cooney Center’s postdoctoral research fellow for the 2013-2014 year. Among the many hats he wore during his fellowship, Jason primarily contributed to planning and collecting data for the New York City sub-study of the Families and Media Project (FAM). He also helped to collect survey data for the Digital Games and Family Life Survey, which examines how parents are gaming together with their children.

Currently, Jason is working with the Cooney Center on several projects. He is co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation Cyberlearning grant exploring how new social media technologies can support science learning together in neighborhoods. Jason is exploring how these technologies can bridge science learning between home, school, and afterschool contexts with Lori Takeuchi as well as his University of Maryland Co-PIs Tamara Clegg and June Ahn. Jason is also supporting the analysis and write-up of both the FAM and Digital Games and Family Life research.

Jason taught high school chemistry for six years in urban, private, and large public schools before earning his doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2014. He’s back in the classroom at UW, teaching Design Thinking (user-centered design in HCI) and an introductory seminar course on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning.

We recently released Family Time with Apps: A Guide to Using Apps with Your Kids, a free interactive guide for parents and caregivers. The book features comic strips that parents and children can enjoy together, as well as tips on selecting apps that can help turn screen time into family time. Whether the challenge is preparing for a new experience like starting school, spending more time outside, connecting to distant loved ones, or reading together every day, the guide provides tips on how using apps together can support a child’s learning and development. It is available from the iBook Store.

We’ve invited some experts to share their own perspectives on the scenarios that we explore in Family Time with Apps. We are thrilled to share this tale of snakes in the house by Melina Gerosa Bellows, chief education officer of the National Geographic Society.

I love when my kids are involved in nature. Especially when the nature is outside.

Let me explain. My nine-year-old son Chase is an avid critter inspector and collector. He will spend hours in the woods near our home, flipping over rocks and old logs to discover the scurrying life underneath. When the rocks are heavy, I’m often talked into aiding and abetting. While I try not to squeal, he grabs the snake.

The snakes come home with us, often in one of my Tupperware containers. Then the plan is they are supposed to be transported to a large tank we have in our yard.

But he loved one snake so much, that he’d bring it inside. Into our brand-new, just-moved-into house.

“She’s pregnant,” he told me.

“How do you know?” I asked. After all, this brown snake looked just like all the others to me.

“I can tell by looking at her,” he said definitely.

Then, one morning before school, all hell broke loose. The snake had escaped from its Lego House (did I mention the snake had also moved into a new house?) and was MIA somewhere upstairs.

Our search party spread out and fanned the area, to no avail. My son went to school heartsick that day. I used it as a teaching moment that nature belonged outside and not in. I explained that, if the snake had escaped in its natural habitat instead of under his bed, it would have been perfectly OK.

One month later while cleaning the house, I picked up the basket of dog toys to find a surprise. The snake! And yup, she had, in fact, been pregnant. There were 27 wriggling babies on the floor as proof.

My kids are digital natives, and if there’s one thing my son loves as much as digging up creepy crawlies outside, it’s my iPad. He loves games and learning and downloading new apps without my permission (but that’s a story for another time!). There are so many great digital tools for helping kids engage with and learn about nature, and I’m a huge fan. Right now I’m loving our National Geographic Kids YouTube channel where my son and I can watch age-appropriate penguin and dinosaur videos without my fear of what might be just two clicks away. Digital nature for digital natives is a win-win for me, because my kids can explore outside and then continue to experience it indoors – just without snake babies.

I am certainly revealing my National Geographic bias here, but my house also loves the Great Nature Project. This is a digital space where anyone can contribute photos of organisms they encounter, from anywhere in the world. So if you see a snake, you can snap a picture and upload it. And then you can leave the snake outside where it’s happy! What’s even cooler is that if you’re not sure exactly what kind of snake it is, the Great Nature community can help you identify the species. The photo (along with its date, time, and location) is automatically shared with the online community of scientists at iNaturalist.org, where they can use the photo, combined with the data points, for research. All confirmed organisms on iNaturalist are shared with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, which collects open-source biodiversity data used by scientists and policy-makers.

As a mom, nothing makes me happier than my kids learning about and experiencing the natural world. It’s even better when they’re also contributing to important scientific work AND not bringing their new pets into the house!

If you’d like some fun ways to get kids active outdoors, look for “National Geographic Kids Get Outside Guide,” available wherever books are sold.

 

Melina Gerosa Bellows is chief education officer of the National Geographic Society. She is responsible for the Education & Children’s Media group, including School Publishing, the National Geographic Education Foundation and the National Geographic Bee.

Bellows joined National Geographic in 2000 as editor of National Geographic World magazine (now National Geographic Kids). An internationally published best-selling author, Bellows’ most recent books are “Love You, Dad” and “Mother’s Love” for National Geographic Books. Her first book with National Geographic, “Nat Geo AMAZING! 100 People, Places, and Things That Will Wow You,” was published in June 2010. It is the companion book to “Nat Geo AMAZING!”, a 10-part television series that debuted on the National Geographic Channel in July 2010.