Tag Archives: families

What is one thing you believe must be done now to improve how children and families are faring during the current crisis, specifically as it relates to the media and technology in their lives?  Join forces with public health to demand investment in family supports. Ralph Smith is Managing Director of the Campaign for Grade Level Reading, an initiative that seeks to disrupt generational poverty by focusing on ensuring early school success for children from low-income families.  Healthcare professionals, while…

Young children spend about two hours each day using screen-based media, about half of which is spent on educational media, according to their parents. Many studies report that children can learn a range of skills from well-designed educational media. Yet we know relatively little about whether and how well children are able to apply skills they’ve learned from digital media in the real world. This question is particularly important for subjects that involve learning about the physical world, like science.…

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…

This guest post summarizes a research paper discussing how Latino children collaboratively search the internet with their adult family members to solve family needs. The research for this project began while Jason Yip was a Research Fellow at the Cooney Center in 2013-14, and has just been presented at the ACM Computer Supported Collaborative Work Conference on November 5th. Read the paper here. Searching for online information is not equitable. People search online to find recipes and to plan trips, but also to find…

In this second installment of the Podcasts for Families series, I was thrilled to be able to interview the enthusiastic Mindy Thomas, co-host of Wow in the World, a show featuring cool science and technology. If you haven’t listened to their show yet, this interview will give you a pretty good sense of what to expect! Although there’s not a totally contiguous storyline in this show, the big personalities of hosts Mindy Thomas and Guy Raz—along with regular characters like Reggie…

Are you looking for some good podcasts for children? We’re thrilled to introduce Podcasts for Families, a new series by Carissa Christner, a youth services librarian in Madison, Wisconsin. You’ll meet the producers of some of the liveliest podcasts for kids and learn more about the craft of creating engaging audio stories that families can enjoy together. I have two children, ages 3 and 7, and over the past year or so we have developed a pretty serious podcast habit. Every…

Children’s learning experiences in home, school, and community settings are often disconnected from one another, and this challenge particularly affects those who are already under-served. How might learning be better linked to support children’s development? How are some communities innovating to address this persistent challenge and how can digital technologies contribute toward solutions? At a special TELOS Initiative symposium at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education on November 8, Lori Takeuchi (Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop), June Ahn (NYU),…

When I was a kid, one of my favorite parts of the week was the recurring Friday night game session at my house. It usually consisted of my dad stoking the fire, my sister watching TV, and my mom and me embroiled in a fierce competition of Chinese Checkers or Othello. There may have been times I fumed while resetting the board pieces (I was not a good loser), but I always enjoyed those game nights and still hold onto those…

For many years, the “digital divide” signaled a split between people with access to the internet and those without. The term expressed concerns about those who may fall behind in the highly digitized economy of the 21st century. But with internet service now present in most U.S. homes, the gap has become more nuanced. Today, the question is less about access and more about quality and consistency of connection. A nationally representative telephone survey of 1,191 families conducted last year…

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…