Tag Archives: learning from hollywood

In 2011, The Cooney Center formed six action teams, based on geographical location.  The teams were charged with building promising practices and scalable models of the ways that media, and particularly digital media, can promote children’s learning in environments outside of school. These teams were an integral part of the Learning From Hollywood Forum where they had the opportunity to network with industry and policy leaders across media, technology, education and philanthropy, and where each team walked away with hard…

Dale Lipschultz, Literacy Officer for the American Library Association, was a panelist in the “Targeted Public Engagement Campaigns” session at the Learning from Hollywood Forum. She is also helping to guide our Action Teams as they work to turn their collective energy into collaborative projects. I came to the Forum with an open mind tempered by a healthy dose of skepticism. As a pragmatic Midwesterner, I wondered if it was reasonable to learn anything relevant from Hollywood. After all, I…

We were thrilled by the energy and enthusiasm that the Action Teams brought to the Cooney Center Leadership Forum last May. The seven groups that we brought together willingly embraced our call to work as local networks of organizations dedicated to making an impact on the future of children’s learning in their communities. We have invited each Action Team to share their experiences at the Forum with us, and hope that they will continue to keep us posted on their…

According to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the typical American child — age 8 to 18 — spends no less than seven and a half hours a day engaged with media. According to research from Sesame Workshop and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, younger children are also consuming media heavily — about 4 hours a day for the typical five year old. Television, cell phones, computers, etc. are not just part of these children’s lives — in a very…

Makeda Mays Green is the Director of Education and Research for Digital Media at Sesame Workshop. We were lucky to have her join us in LA for the Leadership Forum in May. She shares her thoughts on the event and some of her favorite takeaways.   The “Learning from Hollywood” forum was nothing short of amazing! It presented a rare opportunity to connect leaders from the entertainment industry with educational experts from around the country. Over the course of two…

While managing the @cooneycenter Twitter feed and live blog during this week’s Learning From Hollywood Forum, my mental gears were continuously whirring.  Rich threads of conversation spun back and forth online and in face-to-face conversation, through the #cooneyforum hashtag and the generous physical space provided by the USC School of Cinematic Arts (even the terrific film soundstages where lunch was held!) During the coming weeks, I’ll be working with the Michael Levine and Rebecca Herr-Stephensen from the Joan Ganz Cooney…

These videos are courtesy of Scott Traylor, 360kid.com.

Merriam Webster defines an ecosystem as “the complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit.” The Kids+Creativity movement in Pittsburgh is creating a new kind of ecosystem for learning in and out of school, beginning with children in the earliest years and continuing through higher education at institutions that work at the cutting edge of innovation in technology and digital media. Once home to Fred Rogers, a media pioneer in his own right, Pittsburgh…

Scholastic has a 90-year history of helping kids learn to read and encouraging them to love to read. A recent New York Times editorial asks, “Should we be alarmed?” about the availability of e-books. I would respond, quickly and succinctly, no — and yes. No—because at Scholastic, we are committed to meeting kids where they are. If they are reading traditionally or electronically, they have the opportunity to be informed and inspired by the power of the book. When we…

If you were challenged to define what math is, what would you say? How about science? What makes the two different, or maybe even the same? I started exploring the idea of what makes up these educational disciplines as a result of hearing the term STEM more and more in the news. STEM is a short-hand way of referring to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, but is this term simply a collection of separate items, or could there be something…