Category Archives: Guest Posts

Watch a group of young children in a community garden. They’ll dig in the soil, find and play with earthworms and insects, plant seeds in patches of sunlight, and come back to watch them sprout, grow, and bear fruit. With a little help, these kids can be doing more than simply playing in the dirt. They can be learning the beginnings of environmental science and plant biology and practicing critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. Working alongside teachers trained in early STEM…

When I was a kid, one of my favorite parts of the week was the recurring Friday night game session at my house. It usually consisted of my dad stoking the fire, my sister watching TV, and my mom and me embroiled in a fierce competition of Chinese Checkers or Othello. There may have been times I fumed while resetting the board pieces (I was not a good loser), but I always enjoyed those game nights and still hold onto those…

Across the children’s media landscape, from movies to video games, diversity and inclusion have been hot topics for discussion throughout 2016. Much of the conversation has focused on the finished product, such as an app or toy and whether it does an effective job in reflecting the diversity of the world we live in. Looking at the finished product is without a doubt important, but at Diversity in Apps (DIA), we are also nudging the conversation towards a focus on…

Last week, Sandhya Nankani wrote about the White House Conference on gender and diversity in toys. Here she describes the toy industry’s efforts to break down existing stereotypes and create new narratives that empower girls.   The toy world is abuzz with the recent launch of the newest Barbie doll, modeled after Misty Copeland, the first black female principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater. The doll is a part of Barbie’s Sheroes collection, which celebrates female heroes who “like…

Said Joan Ganz Cooney: “Without research, there would be no Sesame Street.” I can say the same about my company, Peekapak. We’ve spoken to over 300 teachers to create Peekapak, a social-emotional learning program for teachers and parents … but, as you can imagine, that takes considerable time, and while we love speaking to educators, we only have so many hours in a day. What’s encouraging for entrepreneurs like myself is that organizations like the Joan Ganz Cooney Center conduct…

We recently released Getting a Read on the App Stores: A Market Scan and Analysis of Children’s Literacy Apps, in which we discuss the challenges facing parents and educators who are looking for quality literacy apps for young children. We invited our colleagues at Common Sense Media—whom we cite as an expert source of reliable app reviews for parents—to tell us more about Graphite, which aims to help educators find high quality apps for students by criteria such as platform,…

Televisions, touchscreens, and smartphones are now almost ubiquitous in homes. Many young children are watching, listening to, or interacting with two to three hours of screen media per day. In the latest installment of the Ideas Lunch series at the Governance Lab, a Brooklyn-based action research lab focused on the use of new technology to govern better, the Cooney Center’s Michael Levine explained that rather than portending the death of reading, devices, apps, and tools can help children learn by…

Imagine someone telling you that a new technology would be available in five years that has the potential to revolutionise childhood and early education. But the downside is that you will have to choose from among 80,000 possible options. This is the problem currently facing many parents. Following the invention of the iPad in 2010, by January 2015 there were 80,000 apps marketed as “educational” in the Apple App Store alone. We recently published a large-scale review of more than…

Family Time with Apps is a free interactive guide for parents and caregivers that highlights some ways that families can use technology together. The book features comic strips that parents and children can enjoy together, as well as tips on selecting apps that can help turn screen time into family time. The guide provides tips on how using apps together can support a child’s learning and development. It is available from the iBook Store. This week, Jason Boog, author of…

My kids are so lucky. Not only because they have my husband and me as parents (ha), but because they have the luxury of all their immediate family members within driving distance. Grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles are around for family gatherings, holidays and birthday celebrations. Certainly a luxury I didn’t grow up with.