Category Archives: Guest Posts

2021 set off alarm bells for big tech when the courageous whistle-blowers Frances Haugen, Sophie Zhang, and Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa made front-page news of irresponsible design of technology – an issue that’s also demonstrated by 5Right’s extensive research. The digital world is entirely human-made: designers, engineers, and rule-makers can imagine and design the digital world so that children are protected from harm and their rights are upheld. A pioneering new standard shows how. Many policymakers, civil society organizations,…

This post originally appeared on the Digital Futures Commission website and appears here with permission.   Last fall, the Digital Futures Commission (DFC) launched ‘Playful by Design: Free play in a digital world.’ The report looks at a crucial important aspect of children’s development – free play – and at how digital products and services succeed and fail in facilitating it. At our launch event, Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE and Professor Sonia Livingstone OBE were joined by key experts in the field of free play who discussed and explored our reporting as…

While young children are off school over winter break, many families will be looking for activities to keep kids learning and having fun. On cold winter days, creating art or music together using a touchscreen app is one way for caregivers to connect and support the cognitive and social development of their early learners.  Research on Joint Media Engagement (JME) from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center demonstrates that media can provide important social, emotional, and cognitive experiences for children when…

This post was originally published on GettingSmart.com Across the United States, children are returning to school. For some, it will be their first time since March 2020. The past year and a half has been a challenging, if not devastating, disruption for families, teachers, and administrators. Now we’re all hungry for a return to normal. But at what cost? Normal, for vast numbers of American students, is not something to which we should aspire to return. For too long, our society…

Like many digital learning products, Sago Mini provides tools to engage parents in their child’s play experience. However, unlike most similar products, you won’t find a single chart, graph, score, or badge that measures your child’s success.  It’s well-established in the industry that while parents often express an interest in having dashboards that track their child’s learning, very few actually use them. With that in mind, it was with some caution that we began to explore the idea for a…

The following excerpt is from Why Play Works: Big Changes Start Small by Jill Vialet and appears here courtesy of publisher Jossey-Bass. The book is designed to support schools, educators, and parents in promoting play as an essential tool to help children learn to manage risks, develop greater self awareness, and build confidence while strengthening social connections. Power of Play One of the most important things the extended youth development community agrees on is that caring adult relationships significantly contribute to…

“We used to love playing Xbox all day. That used to be great. But now that it’s all we really do or have to do, they’re always like, ‘Oh, I’m so bored of Xbox. I just wanna do something else.’” (Boy, Age 17 / Pasco County, Florida) Last year the Joan Ganz Cooney Center launched the By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences initiative. Next Gen Public Media aims to “understand the media habits of tweens and teens and…

“While new technology is connecting us to each other in different and much faster ways, these changes will necessarily have a knock-on effect to how we interact with one another, how younger generations open up to new cultures and ideas, and how we interpret this cultural Tower of Babel from one era to the next.” –Julian Vigo (Forbes, 2019) Generation Z, born mainly between 1997 and 2010, inhabit a world with 24/7/365 access to on-demand media, social media, mobile devices,…

Like many of you, we’ve been thinking a lot about the future. What do we want to take with us from the time before the coronavirus? What’s best left in the past? How do we want to live as we stagger, sore-armed, back into society? If we’ve learned anything from the past year, it’s that collaboration carried us through. Working together is what kept kids learning when the pandemic sent them home. It’s what developed vaccines faster than ever before.…

Growing up, I was used to being the “only one.” I was the only Black girl in many of my elementary school classrooms, newspaper staff, debate team, and even in college lectures at the University of Virginia. That anxious feeling of being surrounded by faces that were not like my own was a familiar one. As an aspiring journalist, I expect I will often be the “only one” in the workplace. While 38% of newsrooms have made diversity gains in…