Category Archives: Guest Posts

“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…

“MOLLY OF DENALI celebrates life in a rural community—a unique one, but rural all the same. Having that commitment to rural representation carry over into the educational resources is tremendously gratifying. And, the fact that families from rural communities across the US had a hand in their creation added both value and authenticity.”—Stephanie McFadden, Alaska Public Media More than 9.3 million, or nearly one in five students in the United States, attend a rural school (Why Rural Matters 2018-19: The…

The following post is part of a series springing from the Cooney Center’s joint initiative with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences. This is a project aimed at exploring the role of public media in the lives of young people by taking stock of the current landscape and imagining a future that public media can build alongside teens and tweens. With that in mind, we are inviting public media practitioners who are already experimenting…

The following post was originally published by the Children’s Media Association and appears here with permission. On June 3, 2020, The New York Times published an article titled, “Please Stop Showing the Video of George Floyd’s Death” by Melanye Price. Ms. Price made the case that repeated showings of this and other videos of African Americans being brutalized by police have not led to change and may be having unintended consequences such as “reinforcing pernicious narratives that black lives do…

Mindy Brooks is the Director of UX for Google Play, and one of the key masterminds around the creation of a new Kids section that features Teacher Approved apps on Google Play. Her kids and family team focuses on designing technology that meets the needs of families around the world and helps other teams understand developmental principles for families that help drive product design and vision. Mindy is also an alumna of Sesame Workshop, where she was Director of Content…

I have been a pediatrician in inner-city Boston for over 45 years. During my residency, I  was trained to diagnose and treat children with acute and chronic medical problems.  Over time, I realized that was not enough to help children be healthy, happy, and do well in school. I learned that the best way I could help children achieve these goals is by helping their parents, and that the best way to reach parents is through their children. An “a-ha”…

For the fourth part of this series, we asked experts to focus their predictions on digital play by answering the question, “How will the way children play with digital media change in the coming months and/or years as a result of the coronavirus pandemic?” Opening the black box of digital play Andrew Przybylski, PhD, is a Psychologist and Associate Professor at the University of Oxford.  Play is the fundamental activity through which humans learn, live, and adapt to the world.…