Category Archives: Guest Posts

We recently released Family Time with Apps: A Guide to Using Apps with Your Kids, a free interactive guide for parents and caregivers. 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. Whether the challenge is preparing for a new experience like starting school, spending more time outside, connecting to distant loved ones, or reading together every day, the guide provides…

We recently released Family Time with Apps: A Guide to Using Apps with Your Kids, a free interactive guide for parents and caregivers. 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. Whether the challenge is preparing for a new experience like starting school, spending more time outside, connecting to distant loved ones, or reading together every day, the guide provides…

This post was originally published in the Huffington Post and appears here with permission. The holiday season is behind us, leaving in its wake newly-unwrapped gifts and a host of stimulating digital toys and games intricately designed to build our brains for the new world order. As parents, we are overwhelmed—dare we say flummoxed—by the sheer amount of so-called “educational” e-products that we can now buy for our children. Indeed, in the latest batch of holiday offerings we even saw…

We recently released Family Time with Apps: A Guide to Using Apps with Your Kids, a free interactive guide for parents and caregivers. 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. Whether the challenge is preparing for a new experience like starting school, spending more time outside, connecting to distant loved ones, or reading together every day, the guide provides…

Despite the fact that 37 percent of the U.S. population consists of people of color, only 10% of children’s books published over the past 18 years contain multicultural content. Today’s celebration of Multicultural Children’s Book Day (MCCBD) is a direct response to this diversity gap that exists in the world of children’s books. Started by two blogger moms and reading and play experts, MCCBD — anchored by the hashtag #ReadYourWorld — is meant to “not only raise awareness for the kids’ books that celebrate diversity, but…

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 word “hacker” was first associated with the ne’er-do-well swagger of the word “pirate.” Hackers disrupted systems that should not be disrupted, after all. We made movies about them—young, disenfranchised punk geniuses huddled in basements, monkeying with our belovedly predictable institutions. Hackers compromised security! Hackers made the status quo vulnerable! Hackers were unwelcome party crashers during a time when our collective had become more reliant on the integrity of our digital networks than on the integrity of wood or steel.…

Sitting at the table in his sunlit kitchen, Jayden was excited to show me a new video on his iPad. More proficient with the technology at age 5 than some adults, he pulled up a video on the screen and said, “Let’s start the magic trick!” As we watch together, Jayden and his dad appear on the screen in the middle of their living room, accompanied by a large cardboard box. As the video plays, Jayden crawled into the box…

Einstein put it best: We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. The world’s most beloved genius reminds us that it doesn’t take a genius to graduate beyond the state of being stumped. It only takes an earnestly dogged jury-rigger. Martha White’s Time Magazine article, “The Real Reason College Grads Can’t Get Hired,” reports the widely-held managerial observation that young job applicants either haven’t been born or bred to think critically…

When studying media for early learning, researchers must keep equity at the forefront, says Shelley Pasnik.  Pasnik, director of the Center for Children and Technology, was one of a group of media creators, scholars, and educators who met in Pittsburgh in early June for the 2014 Fred Forward Conference. Experts discussed how to help children build consistent, positive, and meaningful connections with human beings and new media.  This article was originally published on the Fred Rogers Center blog and appears…