Tag Archives: families

“I know the right answer is to tell an adult, but I would not tell an adult. I would ask my friend Lucy for advice.”  This was a 7th grader’s response to a quiz question about cyberbullying.  The student was clear that while she knew the “correct” answer, it wasn’t the action she would take in real life. Schools tend to focus on talking about digital wellness, encouraging students to earn “cyber-savvy” certificates or creating “be kind online” posters- but…

While young children are off school over winter break, many families will be looking for activities to keep kids learning and having fun. On cold winter days, creating art or music together using a touchscreen app is one way for caregivers to connect and support the cognitive and social development of their early learners.  Research on Joint Media Engagement (JME) from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center demonstrates that media can provide important social, emotional, and cognitive experiences for children when…

Amanda LaTasha Armstrong talks with Jordan and Laura about race, feminism, the digital divide, and the future of EdTech on the #IntotheDigitalFuture podcast.

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…

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast provides has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here and learn more about the series here. Alicia is the Head of Kids and Families Strategy at YouTube, where she focuses on helping children and their parents and caregivers realize their rights to more safely learn, connect, and play online. She was previously the Public Policy Lead for Kids and Families at Google, where she worked on issues…

When it comes to raising healthy and smart kids in the digital age, there really are no easy answers. Parents are often the gatekeepers or guides of our kids’ relationships with technology—and it’s so easy to be overwhelmed by warnings about the dangers of screen time that it can be difficult to think about how to steer them towards safe and healthy digital experiences. But parents are not alone. Policy makers, pediatricians, tech industry leaders, and researchers are working to…

Like many digital learning products, Sago Mini provides tools to engage parents in their child’s play experience. However, unlike most similar products, you won’t find a single chart, graph, score, or badge that measures your child’s success.  It’s well-established in the industry that while parents often express an interest in having dashboards that track their child’s learning, very few actually use them. With that in mind, it was with some caution that we began to explore the idea for a…

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…

When schools shuttered in early 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers from dozens of institutions leaped at the opportunity to investigate how the sudden lockdown would alter formal and informal learning as we had come to know it in the United States. Many were as eager to figure out how to study the evolution of learning at home at a time when it was no longer safe to spend time observing or interviewing learners in person. In our symposium…

For nine months, we have been living in the midst of a pandemic that has thrust us all into a “new normal.” Teachers and students across the country have been thrown into an abrupt experiment in remote learning since the spring. Stark equity issues have come into view, and education leaders are worried about the long-term impact of learning loss, particularly among children from lower-income families. And the stress of isolation from peers and the lack of social interaction has…