Category Archives: Commentary

Reprinted with permission from The Guardian. With Christmas holidays round the corner, many parents are considering the pros and cons of digital books. Storyapps are a hybrid of books, short films and digital games. In the Nosy Crow Cinderella app for example, children do not just hear and read the story. They can dress Cinderella’s stepsisters in their ball clothing, help Cinderella tidy up plates in the kitchen and even insert their “selfie” in one of the magic mirrors. Many…

On December 10, 2014, President Obama hosted the White House Summit on Early Education. Michael Levine was invited to participate in a panel on Equity and Excellence in the Earliest Years hosted by Megan Smith, Chief Technology Officer of the United States and Shannon Rudisill, Director of the Office of Child Care. The following are his remarks:   Good afternoon colleagues, I’m Michael Levine and I run the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.  The Workshop—now over four decades…

We recently released a new guide for parents called Family Time with Apps that features several resources, including Moms with Apps, to help parents find quality apps for their children. We invited them to describe their efforts to help families find age-appropriate apps and games that protect their kids’ privacy.   At Moms with Apps, we recently surveyed more than 400 parents about how they find apps for their children, what are the important criteria, and where they have challenges. …

On November 19th, I covered the biannual Social Innovation Summit held in San Francisco for the Cooney Center and my colleagues at the Disruptor Foundation.  The summit brought together over 1,000 leaders interested in identifying, exploring, and actualizing partnership opportunities across the Business, Technology and Community sectors. I came to the conference eager to learn more about the future of game-based learning (GBL) and its potential to effectively engage students, boost their learning outcomes and put them on a path…

As Thanksgiving approaches, many Americans have been petitioning retailers from opening on Thanksgiving Day, arguing that it is eroding traditional family values. Not only would retail workers have to show up to work and lose out on what has traditionally been a vacation day, bargain hunters would leave their family meals early in order to shop. Critics of Black Friday also point to the irony that just hours after we have given thanks for all we have, we rush out…

“Introduce your hearing-impaired child to a world of new friends,” reads the above 1986 advertisement in Exceptional Parent magazine for the TeleCaption II, a closed-captioning decoder system produced by the National Captioning Institute that could be hooked up to a standard television set.  By “a world of new friends,” the ad alludes to the cast of Sesame Street, symbolized here by bright yellow Big Bird, who boldly stands out from the black-and-white background.  In a mock-up of the TeleCaption II…

Forty five years ago today, the first episode of Sesame Street aired on PBS. As we celebrate the many ways that our friends Grover, Big Bird, and the rest of the gang have changed the landscape of children’s media for so many generations, all of us at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center would like to salute our founder, the woman whose dedication and determination has made such a tremendous impact on the lives of children all over the world. From…

The conversation on reducing the “word gap” in early childhood has reached new heights: Today the White House Office on Science and Technology is hosting a group of policymakers, researchers, and early childhood advocates to exchange ideas on how to help foster language development. The event is titled “Federal, State and Local Efforts to Bridge the Word Gap: Sharing Best Practices and Lessons Learned.” Those of you who follow our blog posts and analysis for Seeding Reading, a joint project…

In 2012, the phrase “Digital Wild West” was used as a catch-all to describe the unregulated and chaotic status of the children’s app landscape. Although the field is still characterized by relatively few rules and low “survival rate,” several efforts have been made to help parents and educators separate the good from the bad, or as the Children’s Technology Review calls it, “dust from magic.” Different people and organizations list the best educational apps or digital books in relation to…

The debate on net neutrality is old news by now, and perhaps even John Oliver has accepted that Federal Communications Commissioner Tom Wheeler seems unlikely to change his mind. But supporters of net neutrality have shown comparable iron will: The protest today staged by Netflix, Reddit, and Vimeo (among others) could be an important step towards ensuring a free and open Internet. But beyond that, we all might look to the development of public education for a preview of coming…