Tag Archives: children

Ever since I joined the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Well-being by Design Fellowship, I have found myself subconsciously auditing my entire virtual world for its well-being design considerations. Does the team budget spreadsheet system promote feelings of competence for my colleagues? How does my wedding website support guests’ sense of identity? Did this airline-app-that-shall-not-be-named consider users’ feelings of autonomy in times of a global airline outage at all? I was delighted to attend the Play Make Learn annual conference at UW…

We are very excited to share new research produced by UNICEF Innocenti – Global Office of Research and Foresight as part of the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) initiative. The Cooney Center was fortunate to hear insights from the researchers as the report was being finalized. From a Cooney Center perspective, there are several things that we love about it: Many initiatives work to create a framework and then leave it there. The RITEC initiative developed the RITEC-8…

A new report from SRI Education describes the quality of educational YouTube videos for prekindergarten- and kindergarten-age children. Findings point to surprising differences from educational television shows, including less use of characters and plot to help kids learn. Many parents question the quality of YouTube video content. So do researchers. According to the 2020 Common Sense Media Census, children are spending more time watching videos online than in any other format. Streaming sites like YouTube have surpassed even television viewing.…

The following article was originally published on Net Family News and appears here with permission. Even though the United States is the only country on the planet that hasn’t ratified the nearly 34-year-old UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, US-based companies that serve kids and teens around the world no longer have any excuse not to uphold their rights. Why is that the case? Not “only” because young people’s lives are now “digital by default,” as psychology professor Sonia Livingstone wrote, or…

This post was originally published on GettingSmart.com Across the United States, children are returning to school. For some, it will be their first time since March 2020. The past year and a half has been a challenging, if not devastating, disruption for families, teachers, and administrators. Now we’re all hungry for a return to normal. But at what cost? Normal, for vast numbers of American students, is not something to which we should aspire to return. For too long, our society…

Learning at Home While Under-Connected: Lower-Income Families During the COVID-19 Pandemic follows up on 2016’s Opportunity for All? Technology and Learning in Lower-Income Families to uncover the perspectives of lower-income parents with children ages 3 to 13.  In March and April 2021, researchers Vikki Katz and Victoria Rideout led a national survey of more than 1,000 parents. The report delves into the experiences that these families had while many children were learning at home during a time when many school buildings…

Launching on World Children’s Day 2020, the Digital Futures Commission invites innovators, policymakers, researchers, and civil society to unlock digital innovation in the interests of children and young people. The work will be informed throughout by insights from children and young people themselves, and is geared toward real-world change for children, guided by the Commissioners and supported by 5Rights Foundation. The work has begun by listening to what children and young people value about the digital world and the changes…

Our colleagues at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab are conducting a research survey to investigate the role of VR in educational strategies catered to children while families are sheltering at home as the COVID-19 pandemic progresses. If you are a parent or guardian of a child in grades K-12 and you have a VR headset at home, please consider participating!    Governments all over the globe have decided to close schools temporarily in an attempt to slow down the…

As we hunker down and shelter ourselves in place to confront yet another day of what we hope is a temporary situation, we can’t help but wonder about the future. What will life be like afterwards? What will return to normal and what will be forever changed as a result of the pandemic? And what will the future hold for our children? The Cooney Center began the exercise of not just wondering, but actively mapping out ideal futures for children…

Let me set the scene. You’ve been invited to a roundtable conversation with 17 international thought leaders working at the intersection of child development, early learning and children’s media. As you look around the table, you see influential early childhood educators, researchers, academics, pediatricians, children’s media producers, advocates and policy experts. It is immediately clear that these leaders and innovators share a commitment to young children and child development first, technology second. Milton Chen, senior fellow at the George Lucas…