Category Archives: Learning Together

Can you turn screen time into family time?  Our new resource, Family Time with Apps: A Guide to Using Apps with Your Kids, provides tips on how apps can be a part of family learning, communication and connecting to one another.  Starting today, it is available to download for free from the iBook store. The guide is an extension of our research on how families use and learn from media.  From Learning: Is there an app for that? to Learning…

“Interactive” is one of the most overused words in the 21st Century, a label attached to thousands of digital devices, apps and TV shows for kids. Interactive tablet apps will read a book to your kid and interactive cartoon characters will invite your kid to dance during a TV show. The word “interactive” can make anything sound more educational. But what does it mean, really? Digital devices generally provide solitary experiences for kids, but these tools are marketed to parents…

This spring, Oxford University Press released an important new contribution to the literature of media and developmental psychology with Media and the Well-Being of Children and Adolescents, edited by Amy B. Jordan and Daniel Romer. The volume examines the role that media play in the daily lives of families with children, from “traditional” media such as television and film as well as “new” digital media, including video games and mobile devices. Together, the research that comprises this volume provides an…

The Aprendiendo Juntos (“Learning Together”) Council is a multi-sector group of researchers, practitioners, and policy experts who seek to identify new models and practical strategies to improve educational outcomes for Hispanic-Latino families, through the wise deployment of digital technologies. In June 2012, the National Center for Families Learning, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and the National Council of La Raza convened the first Hispanic-Latino Families and Digital Technologies Forum to discuss the ways in which Hispanic-Latino families engage with and…

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Lori Takeuchi and Briana Pressey had the wonderful opportunity to be on a panel at the American Education Research Association 2014 (AERA 2014) annual conference in Philadelphia, PA. This panel was titled, “Learning With Technology: Different Perspectives From Low-Income Families” and held under the Special Interest Group – Advanced Technologies for Learning. Lori and Briana began the panel with their talk, “The Impacts of Technology on Family Life: Engaging With Media Together, Apart, and On…

Last week Cooney Center Executive Director Michael Levine spoke at “Advancing Learning in the Digital Age,” a forum hosted by the Hourglass Foundation in Lancaster, PA. He spoke about the increasingly prominent role of digital technology in the lives and education of young children before an audience of more than 200 people. Watch the video of his talk below: Read more about the event on lancasteronline.org and see more videos on WITF.org.

Michael Levine recently appeared on WQED’s IQSmartParent with host Angela Santomero to discuss kids, apps, and the digital divide.

Lisa Guernsey, Director of the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation, moderated the “Maximizing Impact” discussion at the Learning at Home Forum in New York on January 24.  Her commentary on the report appears on Slate.com; an excerpt appears here with permission. Any self-respecting skeptic has to be careful with the word educational. Thousands of games in the iTunes App Store describe themselves as “educational,” but are they? On TV, preschool shows declare that it’s “learning time,” but is…

On January 24, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center released the results of a national survey of more than 1500 parents of children ages 2-10, and their perceptions of educational media use at home. Read on for slides from the Learning at Home Forum last week and highlights from the report.   We were thrilled to see a standing-room only crowd at our venue, the second floor galleries at McGraw Hill in midtown Manhattan. Michael Levine welcomed the audience and provided an…

Dale Kunkel, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of Arizona. He spoke as a provocateur at the Learning at Home Forum on January 24, 2014 in New York. Here, he shares his thoughts on the dearth of quality educational content for older kids on various platforms, including television, mobile devices, and video games. A video of his remarks is available below. Kids spend several hours every day with screen media – watching TV, surfing the Internet, playing…