As if any of us needed a reminder, the last few days showed us how quickly things can change. A month ago—or even a week ago—no one knew quite how different our day-to-day lives would be. Suddenly, kids are out of school, parents are working from home, and the way we socialize and interact with each other has seismically shifted. Now more than ever, families need to feel confident in their technology—which has been helping us stay connected when we can’t physically be together. And because tech is a crucial lifeline right now, it’s important that parents feel empowered when using it with their kids. Now more than ever, we need to rely on technology to socialize, spur our creativity and help us continue learning.

Earlier this year, I published my first book Screen Captured, a resource that helps families navigate technology. In it, I looked at a few of the less positive ways tech has affected our lives, but the major message (and the one I think is so important right now) is that apps, platforms and devices have the potential for so much good.

A deep dive into the literature

I arrived at writing in a roundabout way as I was doing research for Kinzoo, the kid-tech company I founded in 2018. Back then, one of the biggest concerns about technology was around the addictive nature of some apps and platforms—and many of the tech world’s founders were speaking candidly about the manipulative features they had built (intentionally or otherwise) into their products. I read books like Adam Alter’s Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and began learning how apps are designed to keep us screen captured. I felt I had to learn everything I could about the ways tech could go wrong so we didn’t inadvertently include addictive or manipulative features in Kinzoo. So down the rabbit hole I went, devouring as many resources and studies as I could—and it took a while before I started to feel like I had a foothold on the topic.

In the course of researching, I’d implemented a few changes around tech use in my own household. We used to “timestamp” tech with my kids, imposing limits on total screen time, but we started to find it more useful to think critically about what the kids were doing instead of focusing only on duration. And, now that my kids are home from school, the idea of screen time limits are the last thing on our minds. Sure, we still have rules and structures in place, but we’re not beating ourselves up if we’re relying a little more heavily on screens than we did last week.

After writing my book—and indeed today—I’m more confident than ever that tech will be a positive force for my kids. But, I know not every parent eats, sleeps and breathes tech like I do, and I recognize that many families could probably benefit from the legwork I’d done while building Kinzoo.

Empowering families to talk about tech

I always used to say, “technology isn’t coming, it’s here.” And boy, does that ring true now! We’re all using tech in new ways to check in on loved ones, work and learn remotely—and entertain ourselves. But, parents still probably have questions about how to integrate it into their family’s lives.

Screen Captured is not a step-by-step guide, and that’s quite intentional. I’m not a psychologist or professional researcher, but I am a dad with stories about my own lived experience introducing tech to my daughter. For me, this book isn’t about telling parents what to do. Rather, it’s about sharing what I’d learned on this journey—and hopefully equipping others to have productive conversations about the role of technology in their families. It’s about pulling back the curtain on the tech industry and bringing some transparency to the way apps and platforms operate—and what that means for our kids.

My hope is that Screen Captured can be a tool to help parents cut through the noise and gain the confidence to tell good tech from bad. In it, I spell out the difference between positive screen time—which is educational, creative and connecting—and screen capture, which uses manipulative mechanisms to keep us scrolling ad infinitum. All the research that I did really helped to simplify the role of technology in my household, and has made it a much less contentious subject with my kids. I think the book can do the same for other parents, and I’m really excited by that.

When I first published Screen Captured, I shared an advanced copy of the audiobook with a friend and fellow parent. She listened to it one chapter at a time with her kids on their drive to school, and she shared some interesting insights: it’s prompted her son to share stories about how he and his friends use tech, and it’s inspired her daughter to experiment with phone-free time during the day. She noted that sharing the book with her kids (as opposed to reading it and relaying the information), opened up a collaborative conversation in her family around tech use.

There’s no denying it—we’re facing a lot of uncertainty right now. Things aren’t the same as they were last week, and we don’t know what next week will look like. If I could go back in time and make any changes to Screen Captured, I would double down on my message that screens can be a force for good. I think parents need to hear that on repeat right now, because screens will inevitably be a more prominent part of our lives, at least for a little bit. If ever there was a moment to throw time stamping out the window, surely it’s now. Whatever helps you and your family stay happy, healthy and connected, do it. And do it with confidence.

 

Sean Herman is the founder of Kinzoo, a video-sharing app where children can connect and parents can be sure they’re safe. Kids use Kinzoo to access the best of what technology has to offer: empowering creativity, connecting with friends and family and learning about the things they love within closed, managed communities.

 

As a result of COVID-19, families around the world are struggling to adjust, adapt, and keep each other safe. In response, Sesame Workshop is launching the Caring for Each Other initiative – a commitment to supporting families for the duration of this crisis. Through this initiative, we will be introducing brand new content from Sesame Street and Streets around the world, as well as an online hub at SesameStreet.org/caring offering a rich array of free resources to support children and families.  

• On Sesame Street, we will be creating video messages of love and kindness, activities and virtual play dates featuring the Sesame Street Muppets (launching soon). Families can also now watch full episodes on HBO and PBS, with an expanded offering of free on-demand episodes of Sesame Street on PBS KIDS digital platforms 
• On Streets around the world, we are developing brand new content on healthy habits like handwashing and how taking good care of yourself means taking good care of others, which will be available globally – in English and a wide range of languages – in the coming weeks 
• Online, we are providing resources designed to help parents provide comfort and manage anxiety, as well as help with creating routines, fostering playful learning at home, and staying physically and mentally healthy 

In the coming days, Sesame Workshop will be actively reaching out with more information about how to support, share, and distribute these critical resources. 

Our mission to help kids everywhere grow smarter, stronger, and kinder remains and we are committed to helping families navigate through this crisis, as long as it continues. Now, more than ever, let’s work together to extend the Sesame spirit – particularly, strength and kindness – to the kids in our lives and each other. 

Please visit SesameStreet.org/caring to learn more. 

 

On Thursday, March 12, 2020, PBS SoCal, KCET and the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest district in the nation, announced a plan to provide Pre-K–12th grade educational programming throughout the daytime on PBS SoCal, KCET, and KLCS channels. This partnership has the potential to serve more than 600,000 students across Southern California. This multi-platform initiative includes robust digital resources, created in collaboration with KQED in San Francisco, through our online platform, PBS LearningMedia.

Public television has long served as a source of informal education and enrichment, providing cognitive stimulation aligned to educational curricula. Drawing on inspiration from Fred Rogers, PBS SoCal and KCET hope to bring some stability to families in our community during this time of school closures through the power of public media.

Today, children are growing up exposed to, using, and consuming more media than any other generation (Rideout, 2013). Research has shown that certain educational media content can help young children develop social skills, language skills, and even school readiness (Brown & Council on Communications and Media, 2011). Technology and media have changed the way children learn, and high-quality media can prepare learners to develop skills and knowledge. Sesame Street and other children’s media programs have demonstrated positive effects in improving children’s skills (Fisch et al., 1999; Cole et al., 2018).

Television is still very much a part of our environment. Despite the rapid proliferation of different content streams, families still come together in front of the television (Doran, 2015; Vittrup & Holden, 2011). PBS stations are vital partners in this family viewing time, as they work in their local communities to provide educational and engaging content to families who need it most— whole-child, whole-families, and whole-communities. In addition, that’s where PBS SoCal and KCET can have the most significant impact in responding to emergencies like COVID19. We are a vital resource, providing innovative and research-based content that has the potential to improve outcomes for students affected by school closures.

PBS SoCal and KCET have built a programming schedule to support all students beginning on Monday, March 16, with blocks of educational programming. We are also working to create content and digital resources—designing content like educational, grade-specific scripts for curriculum-driven programming breaks. Furthermore, we are aligning digital resources for educational tie-ins to broadcast programming that families and educators can access through PBS LearningMedia. In this way, PBS SoCal and KCET are placing collaborative media and digital resources where educators and families can draw upon them when connecting learning across settings (Takeuchi et al., 2019).

PBS LearningMedia can provide opportunities for educators to stay connected and support their students. Notably, interactive media are most effective when age-appropriate for children and include the use of digital literacy and curriculum implementation in classrooms as well as at home to supplement to traditional learning (NAEYC & Fred Rogers Center 2012; Penuel et al., 2012). As such, we are also working in partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District Division of Instruction Office, listening to their needs and helping them integrate PBS shows into their weekly, at-home activities. Instructional administrators have designed activities that fit within their available time and resources, drawing on PBS shows and creating links between enriched media-based experiences and classroom-based activities for students and families to learn together. With this model, we have the potential to ease the stresses of COVID-19 in a small but important way by providing families with access to online, on-air resources accessible through television and mobile devices.

PBS SoCal and KCET are developing a new education service model to meet the needs of educators and families in innovative, cross-disciplinary, and collaborative ways. We have been leading grassroots education outreach focused on technology, teachers, and parents since implementing Ready To Learn in 2011. Through Ready To Learn, PBS SoCal and KCET have partnered with school districts to improve access to early education opportunities in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Working with these partners, I’ve seen how media and digital resources brought families and students together in unexpected ways. Our at-home learning program can be the tool to connect home and school learning. Today, public media is proving its mission is more important than ever.

 

 

References

Brown, A., & Council on Communications and Media. (2011). Media use by children younger than 2 years. Pediatrics, 128(5), 1040-5.

Cole, C. F., Lee, J. H., Bucuvalas, A., & Sırali, Y. (2018). Seven essential elements for creating effective children’s media to promote peacebuilding: Lessons from international coproductions of Sesame Street and other children’s media programs. New Directions for Child & Adolescent Development, 2018(159), 55–69. https://doi-org.lib.pepperdine.edu/10.1002/cad.20229.

Doran, L. (2015). The common sense census: Media use by tweens and teens. Education Week, 35(13).

Fisch, S., Truglio, R., & Cole, C. (1999). The impact of Sesame Street on preschool children: A review and synthesis of 30 years’ research. Media Psychology, 1(2), 165-190.

Penuel, W., Bates, L., Gallagher, L., Pasnik, S., Llorente, C., et al. (2012). Supplementing literacy instruction with a media-rich intervention: Results of a randomized controlled trial. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 27(1), 115-127.

Rideout, V. (2013). Zero to eight: Children’s media use in America 2013. Common Sense Media.

Takeuchi, L., Vaala, S., & Ahn, J. (2019). Learning across boundaries: How parents and teachers are bridging children’s interests. New York: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.

Vittrup, B., & Holden, G. (2011). Exploring the impact of educational television and parent-child discussions on children’s racial attitudes. Analyes of Social Issues and Public Policy, 11(1).

 

 

Susana Beltran Grimm is Director, Early Learning at PBS SoCal, where she has spent the past 11 years developing and implementing innovative education initiatives. She has designed STEM parent curricula using learning technologies and PBS KIDS assets to launch a series of bilingual parent engagement workshops and is responsible for building, sustaining, and expanding mutually beneficial relationships between PBS SoCal and the Southern California community. Susana previously managed the Parent Institute for Quality Education parent engagement education programs. She has helped address the needs of communities with engaging educational content and enhanced the agency’s awareness and service knowledge. Susana has a Bachelor’s degree in Asian American Studies and a minor in Applied Psychology in Education from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a Master’s degree in Public Administration from California State University, Long Beach and is pursuing a Doctor of Education in Learning Technologies with a focus in STEM Family Engagement at Pepperdine University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Young children spend about two hours each day using screen-based media, about half of which is spent on educational media, according to their parents. Many studies report that children can learn a range of skills from well-designed educational media. Yet we know relatively little about whether and how well children are able to apply skills they’ve learned from digital media in the real world. This question is particularly important for subjects that involve learning about the physical world, like science. There is a small amount of evidence that children can learn science from media. At the same time, digital media differ from the real world in ways that may be challenging for children to reconcile: digital science media are two-dimensional, are often cartoon-like or anthropomorphized, and frequently focus on refuting misconceptions rather than teaching science facts. Yet there may be ways to design science media to support children in connecting their learning to the real world. A recent study conducted by Education Development Center (EDC) and SRI Education found that four- to five-year-old children can apply science skills that they learned from digital media in the real world. The study was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education’s Ready To Learn initiative, led by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS.

In this randomized-control trial, researchers assigned 454 four- and five-year olds from low-income households to either a treatment or control group. Both groups received tablet computers with internet access. The treatment group’s tablets were loaded with resources from the third season of The Cat in the Hat Knows A Lot About That! including videos, games, and hands-on/real world activities. Researchers asked the control group to use other educational media of their own choosing. Researchers asked families in both groups to have their children use the resources for one hour per week over eight weeks.

At the beginning and the end of the study, researchers assessed the children’s science and engineering knowledge and practices using several measures, including hands-on performance-based tasks to assess their understanding in three areas:

• structural stability,
• forces and friction, and
• how objects can be sorted based on material properties and uses.

The structural stability task provided children with a group of objects of different strengths and lengths, and asked them to choose the most suitable object for building a bridge that can support weight. The forces and friction task provided children with three differently textured slides and asked them to choose the slide that would enable a toy figure to slide down fastest. The sorting task asked children to sort items based on material properties such as color, size, shape, and use.

Researchers found that access to Cat in the Hat resources had medium to large impacts on children’s understanding of the role of strength and length in structural stability and the influence of friction on movement down an incline. This finding suggests that young children’s experiences with manipulating objects in digital games and watching characters manipulate objects in digital videos can, in fact, transfer to off-screen contexts. Meanwhile, the study found no significant effect on the sorting task, which suggests that some skills may be more difficult for preschoolers to transfer from digital to hands-on contexts.

What helped preschoolers transfer their learning from digital videos and games to two of the hands-on tasks used in this study? The study did not attempt to disentangle which aspects of the resources were most effective, but we speculate a few reasons based on prior research.

First, the Cat in the Hat resources used in this study—videos, games, and hands-on activities—were intentionally developed to support young children’s understanding of physical science and engineering. The resources are aligned with the K-12 Next Generation Science Standards and the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework. They focus on physical science and engineering concepts, which lend themselves to visual depiction. Each resource focuses on one or two focal concepts. Characters model the associated practices and vocabulary realistically, even though they are often in fanciful contexts. This focused, deliberate approach may support children’s deeper learning.

In addition, children found the Cat in the Hat materials to be engaging and fun, evidenced by the fact that over half of the children in the treatment group (59%) engaged with the Cat in the Hat games and videos for more than 20 hours over the eight week study. Parents also reported that treatment children watched the Cat in the Hat videos on other platforms, such as Netflix and YouTube, and a few parents said their children mimicked the activities they saw in the media with their toys. Children who are more engaged may learn more: researchers found some evidence that the more time children watched the “Bridge-a-rama” videos and played the “Slidea-ma-zoo” games, the more they outperformed our predictions on the related assessments, although this relationship was not linear and weakened at very high levels of use. Why did families find the materials engaging? It could be the show’s entertaining narratives. Studies show that children are more likely to retain educational concepts if the digital media follow a plot or a narrative and are therefore able to keep them engaged. The Cat in the Hat himself may also have engaged children—children tend to learn more from characters they know and like.

Further, children may have benefitted from the inclusion of both videos and digital games in this study as both have strengths for supporting learning. Studies have found that young children can transfer skills from game-like digital activities to the real world. Videos may be even more effective than games for supporting transfer of hard-to-learn skills, perhaps because playing games demands more working memory capacity. Games may be more effective for helping preschoolers transfer their learning to similar tasks, whereas videos may be more effective for helping preschoolers transfer their learning to different tasks. The mix of both videos and games in this study may have exposed children to the same ideas in multiple ways, supporting their ability to think flexibly about science content.

This study suggests that children may be able to apply skills learned from high-quality digital STEM media in off-screen, hands-on situations. Based on prior research, we speculate that media can help children connect digital to real-world learning by providing focused educational content in the context of engaging narratives that span digital videos and games.

 

 

 

Claire Christensen is an education researcher at SRI International in the Center for Learning and Development. She conducts research and program evaluations on educational media for young children. She is particularly interested in media’s potential to promote social-emotional learning and STEM skills. She earned her Ph.D. in community and prevention research from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

 

Lucy Nelson is a researcher at the Education Development Center’s Center for Children and Technology. Lucy works on a variety of research projects involving media and digital resources to support early childhood education and at-home learning. Her main research interests include equitable access to education, specifically at the preschool and elementary level, and how educational technology and media can close the learning gap. She earned her B.A. in International Development at McGill University.

Megan Silander is a researcher at the Education Development Center’s Center for Children and Technology. She conducts research on the use of digital tools and media to increase capacity to support children’s learning, both in and out of school. Her recent research has focused particularly on under-resourced families’ use of media and technology to support their children’s learning in the home, including research conducted for the US Department of Education’s CPB-PBS Ready To Learn initiative. Megan holds a Ph.D. in education policy from Teachers College, Columbia University.