Category Archives: Guest Posts

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.

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.…