Category Archives: Commentary

Cynthia Chong is an educational media researcher whose research focuses on how the design of educational media can affect young children’s learning and the way they interact with them, as well as how parents and teachers use these technologies to teach. She recently began reviewing educational apps for 3- to 8-year-olds on her blog, A Matter of App. We’ve invited Cynthia to tell us a little bit more about this blog and why it’s important for parents, educators, and designers…

For the second year in a row, the iPad is the most popular item that children are asking for as a holiday gift.  Given that it is the season for making wish-lists, it is in this spirit that I offer my own iPad research wish-list for 2012. The items on this list will surely keep a variety of researchers busy in the new year and would help address some critical questions about the iPad in particular, but touch screens in…

Marilyn Jager Adams’s report, “Technology for Developing Children’s Language and Literacy: Bringing Speech Recognition to the Classroom,” was released this fall by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. This commentary was recently published by Education Week.   As everyone who follows such things knows, U.S. students, as a group, do not read very well. Yet, if you are among those who have read about this-indeed, if you are among those who are reading this Commentary, then you (and most of your…

Picture for a second the first thing you ever constructed, designed, prototyped, or invented. If you’re like most of us, there’s a pretty good chance that you built your idea using toys like LEGOs, Play-Doh, Lincoln Logs, or perhaps, to your parents’ dismay, a mix of all of the above (good luck getting Play-Doh out of those bricks). Over the years, magazines like MAKE have featured lots of DIY toy projects, but very few talk about designing for Creative Play…

The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) has just published a policy brief authored by Michael Levine, the executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and James Paul Gee, the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. Reed an excerpt of the brief below and download the full PDF here.   Almost 30 years after the landmark study A Nation at Risk, and the subsequent hundreds of billions spent trying to ramp-up children’s mastery of basic…

This interview with Michael Levine originally appeared in Literacy 2.0 in August, 2011. It appears here with the permission of the author, Robert L. Lindstrom.   In 2007, the year the iPhone was introduced, the venerable children’s TV programmer Children’s Television Workshop (now named Sesame Workshop) spun off a nonprofit research and production institute intended to do for digital media what Sesame Street did for television, namely make the medium both educational and entertaining at the same time. The center…

“There was a lot of emotion around 9/11, but of course there was no clear path on what to do with this.  But we had this show, this incredible entryway into homes that had credibility amongst parents and children.  How could we best use it?” -Dr. Lewis Bernstein, Executive Vice President of Education and Research at Sesame Workshop   With the 10th anniversary of September 11th this past weekend, many of us have been reflecting on what we were doing…

This post originally appeared on the Education Nation Learning Curve Blog. Last week, President Obama announced an innovation and competitiveness initiative designed to stimulate children’s interest in math and science careers. It was filled with solid ideas for engaging both struggling and advanced students in rigorous and relevant science and math study, but fell short in one arena that youth crave:  the use of digital technology.  In fact, a few weeks earlier the President asked parents to encourage kids to…

One of the perks of working with The Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop is getting to meet people doing amazing things.  The industry is full of passionate organizations and individuals that are using digital media to promote children’s healthy development and learning in a multitude of ways I never would have dreamed of.  As part of my blog series, I hope to occasionally spotlight these organizations — groups that are doing something different, something amazing, or something inspiring.  It wasn’t…

According to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the typical American child — age 8 to 18 — spends no less than seven and a half hours a day engaged with media. According to research from Sesame Workshop and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, younger children are also consuming media heavily — about 4 hours a day for the typical five year old. Television, cell phones, computers, etc. are not just part of these children’s lives — in a very…