Tag Archives: educators

The following post is part of a series springing from the Cooney Center’s joint initiative with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences. This is a project aimed at exploring the role of public media in the lives of young people by taking stock of the current landscape and imagining a future that public media can build alongside teens and tweens. With that in mind, we are inviting public media practitioners who are already experimenting…

Before the Future of Childhood: Immersive Media and Child Development salon took place in November 2018, we invited experts to share their visions about the ways VR and AR might impact childhood 10 years from now. Lisa Castaneda, Co-Founder and CEO of foundry10, shares an optimistic view of VR’s potential to shape learning experiences in the future.   Foundry10 is a research organization working across many domains, and we have been studying VR and students for several years. Today, students…

If you happened to be visiting Independence National Historical Park in late October, you might have seen some of us educators and park rangers walking around with cell phones and taking pictures of things not normally featured on the postcards sold in the Park’s gift store. In addition to the Liberty Bell and the Mall, these photos included steam coming out of manhole covers, late budding plants growing along the parks’ edges, sidewalk patterns made of river stones, bricks and…

Both Minecraft and YouTube are ubiquitous in today’s children’s media culture. And like millions of other children, my six-year-old son loves to watch Minecraft videos on YouTube. He frequently watches Grian’s how-to-build-it Minecraft videos. He enjoys the silly antics from Pat and Jen of Gaming with Jen, the husband-and-wife team who produce PopularMMOs. And he loves Stampy Cat—but more on Stampy later. Minecraft-themed YouTube videos are definitely a different genre from the children’s television that I grew up watching! As is…

This post was originally published on The Hechinger Report and appears here with permission. Over the past several years, at the same time that the words “screen time” became shorthand for children zoning out, several researchers and educational experts have been taking an entirely different track. They have been studying how and at what age children come to learn words, follow stories, and grasp educational concepts that appear in ebooks, videos, and apps. New experiments on The Adventures of SuperWhy!, Peg+Catand…

Today’s announcement by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the joint statement of the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on “media use and young minds” is a timely response to a hot debate in parenting and early childhood circles: When and how often should young children use screens? For years, the health and child development establishment has advised against exposing toddlers, and babies in particular, to screen media.  But daily life has…

Over the past several years, New America and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop have become known for our book Tap, Click, Read and for our joint research and analysis on how digital technologies could be used to improve, instead of impede, early literacy.  Now our two organizations are going a step further: This month we are releasing a toolkit of materials designed to help educators and other leaders put these insights into practice to help children learn…

“Ugh! I hate coding!” cried out one of my seventh-grade students. “I don’t see why I have to move Elsa three spaces to meet Anna. It’s soooo boring!” “But with Twine you are coding,” I explained. “I guess,” she responded, unenthusiastically. The above conversation was an actual exchange I had with a student in my social studies class this past school year. She was referencing an Hour of Code activity she was assigned to complete for another class. In it,…

In the last few years, I’ve worked with a lot of teachers using mobile devices in the classroom. The first week is always exciting – “There are SO many apps to choose from!” Yet, two weeks later, teachers’ attitudes have shifted from optimistic to overwhelmed. “There are SO many apps to choose from—how will I figure out which ones are actually good? And how on Earth am I going to figure out how to use them all effectively?!” The educational…

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is proud to partner with the Education Software Association (ESA) Foundation on a number of initiatives, including our very own National STEM Video Game Challenge. We are especially excited about the ESA Foundation for the Education Challenge Grant, which launched this winter.  The program recognizes and rewards educators who “incorporate creativity and technology in their lessons” and reflect the ways that games can make to a positive contribution to children’s learning. The ESA Foundation’s Education Challenge…