Tag Archives: digital media

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…

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…

Our new report, Digital Media and Latino Families, takes stock of recent research that reveals widening use of digital media by Latino children, along with the multifaceted effects on their learning and their families. We find, empirically speaking, that the much discussed “digital divide” no longer hampers Latino families, as parents continue to buy mobile devices and computers shared with their children. But we also found that Latino parents report their children use electronic tools less often for school work or…

A Collaborative Experiment On January 23, 2015, researchers, educators, and digital media professionals spent the day at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the d.school) to imagine how to better support the needs and interest-driven learning of families with children through digital media. The “Designing Media for Underserved Families” event, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies program, continued in the cross-sector collaborative spirit of the LIFE Center and the Families and Media consortium, in…

This spring, I was given an extremely exciting opportunity when the Fred Rogers Center named me an Early Career Fellow. The mission of the Fred Rogers Center is to advance the fields of early learning and children’s media by acting as a catalyst for communication, collaboration, and creative change. This mission complements the work I’ve been doing at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which also focuses on advancing children’s learning through digital media. Here at the Cooney Center, I’ve done…

This year, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center will be a part of not just one, but two sessions at the Digital Media and Learning Conference, an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub. The conference, which takes place March 6-8th, 2014 in Boston, brings together scholars and practitioners who aim to foster interdisciplinary and participatory dialog while linking theory, empirical study, policy, and practice. This year is focused on the…

Today we are thrilled to release a new report, T is for Transmedia: Learning through Transmedia Play. This report, which we have co-authored along with Erin Reilly, and which begins with an introduction by Henry Jenkins, is the product of a year-long collaboration between the Cooney Center and the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. Transmedia is an idea that has evolved over the past decade to describe the complex relationships that exist between media texts, media…

Cooney Center fellow Christina Hinton is moderating a panel at the Digital Media and Learning (DML) Conference called Getting Global With It: Youth Global Participation in the Digital Age With an internationally interdependent economy, unprecedented levels of migration, and a continuous stream of information circulating the planet, children are growing up in a globalized world. In this era of globalization, children need to develop intercultural understanding. Modern digital technologies provide exciting new avenues for helping children gain this important skill.…

The annual Kids@Play Summit for industry professionals in related fields will meet at the Consumer Electronics Show this January at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The summit will include three exhibit days as well as a conference on January 9, 2013, which features several experts in the field of digital media for children and topics such as the transformation of play, interactive media use, learning, and communication in a digital age. Speakers include the keynote speaker, Nolan Bushnell (Founder of…

When it comes to digital media for kids, there is no lack of options in terms of what kids are consuming. From television, to computer games, to e-books, apps, and so much more, children are consuming media in constantly expanding ways. In such an increasingly crowded digital landscape, it’s important to consider the skills that kids need to successfully navigate and inhabit this world. Now what do I mean by skills? Some people refer to it as “digital literacy,” “21st…