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Can technology support children’s social and emotional development? Fred Rogers, the creator and host of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, was a genius at using television – the innovative educational technology of his day – to let every child viewer know that he or she was unique, valuable, and special “just the way you are.” He spoke through the camera simply and honestly to young children about issues that mattered to them, from feelings to the wonders of nature. It turns out that this was not just an act: adults who interacted with Fred consistently report that he was an extremely sincere, caring human being who conveyed a deep personal respect to every individual he met. Nothing could be more fundamental to healthy social and emotional development. I was reminded of Fred Rogers’ contributions to children’s media last week, when I attended the first annual Fred Forward conference dedicated to continuing his legacy through “technology and new media for nurturing a young child’s natural curiosity as foundational for learning.” Read more...
A love of learning is just about the most important thing we can give our children to prepare them for life success. Rapid change, digital technologies, and global connections define the world they are inheriting. Gone are the days when one set of skills will support lifetime pursuit of a single craft or profession. As adults, today's children will most likely change jobs many times and be exposed to new ways of thinking and acting on a regular basis. In their world, living and learning go hand-in-hand, lifelong, 24/7. While that may sound daunting to us adults, it's kind of exciting for kids! Read more...
This week, a friend asked me about digital photography for kids. Do they like taking pictures? Could it be educational? You bet! Here’s why. Read more...
True innovations in early childhood education are rare. A significant recent example is the Tools of the Mind curriculum developed over the last 15 years by Dr. Elena Bodrova and Dr. Deborah Leong at Metropolitan State College of Denver. Based on the theories of the famous Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, their program has received growing attention for helping children develop the kind of emotional and cognitive self-control associated with success in school and life. Read more...
Television in the 1960s was a new, innovative communications medium that, according to many critics, was producing a “vast wasteland” of empty entertainment instead of living up to its potential to inform and educate millions of viewers.* Sesame Street was designed to combat this trend, by using the unique features and formats of commercial TV to educate young children, especially ones that needed it most. Now, at age 40, Sesame Street is like a healthy middle-aged parent, fit and vibrant, proudly overseeing a family that has spread to 140 countries, and embracing the next wave of 21st Century digital media and educational needs. Read more...
LeapFrog is known for creating innovative playful learning technologies in the form of interactive books, toys, mobile gaming, and other media. Parents and teachers have always embraced our products because they see how kids enjoy and learn from them. As Director of Learning, I know that this educational quality is the result of a partnership among many talented people inside our company, but also with families who tell us what they want from our products, and a wider community of educational experts. Read more...
A colleague recently sent me a Boston Globe article entitled “Pressure-Cooker Kindergarten” that tells the story of how educational testing pressure has trickled down to Kindergarten where it has essentially eliminated play as a legitimate form of learning. Related scholarly reports cite similar concerns for pre-school classrooms and even our society’s approach to childhood (see references below). As a developmental psychologist, I understand how child-initiated play drives children’s development and learning. Indeed, playfulness can be a powerful pedagogy in any setting. Read more...
Geo-literacy is the ability to think, act, and communicate in geographic terms. It provides a fun way to promote healthy physical development, practical skills for navigating everyday life, and broad understandings for success in a global world. For young children, it starts with the places, people, plants, animals, and things they encounter everyday. Read more...
Over the Fourth of July weekend, my wife and I had dinner out with family and friends during our trip to Bangalore, India where she is from. We had a long table on the restaurant’s thirteenth floor balcony with a lovely view of the city. As it happened, I sat at the end of the table, across from five-year-old Sareena, the daughter of close family friends.
“What would we talk about for the next hour or two?” I wondered. We started with a basic physics problem, how to safely remove the bright red cherry from the bottom of her tall glass of fresh lime soda. After a largely non-verbal interaction, she met her goal using a spoon and plastic stir stick, only to let the cherry drop back to the bottom of the glass where she could fish it out again. Sometimes problem solving is its own reward!
Our next conversation involved a spoon, a pen, and paper, prompted by the international symbol for “no-smoking” posted behind me. First, I slowly printed the letters s-p-o-o-n on the paper, circled the word, and then crossed it with a single diagonal line. Declaring “no spoon”, I banished one from our end of the table. When she wrote “spoon ok” it returned. Sareena quickly got the concept linking symbol-language-action, and played out variations with a water bottle, fork, and ultimately the pen.
The next topics attracted two tweens from the other end of the table, my niece, Rhea, and nephew, Vikram. First, we drew mazes for Sareena and her younger brother Sonu to follow, and then created a rhyming contest made possible by the strong academic curriculum in Sareena’s kindergarten and our shared use of the English language. In this game, we alternated writing rhyming words starting with “cat” and ending 17 turns later with “drat.” Sareena’s final move, with advice from her mom, was “gnat”!
Looking back at that Sunday dinner reminds me that children are open to exploration and learning wherever they are, and often just need a little help to make the most of the opportunity.
Books, comics, TV, movies… I was a multimedia kid, pretty much from the start, taking in stories from many sources and appreciating the multiple perspectives that they inspired.
When I was a very young child my mother would read bedtime stories and sing me to sleep. The book I remember most vividly is Bambi. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the picture on the shiny hard cover. Of course, I also knew the story and images from the movie, which had made a powerful impression on me, especially the scene hinting at the mother’s death.
In elementary school, my favorite TV show was Batman. Too young to understand the tongue-in-cheek genre of the show, I was fully absorbed into the battles of good and evil annotated on-screen with exclamations like Biff! Bamm! and Kaboom! I knew these were the convention of comics because my favorite was a 3D Batman book that I would read with a flashlight, under the covers, late at night.
As a middle school student, reading for pleasure accompanied summer vacations at our family cottage in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. While I loved the hiking, skiing, and swimming that defined the season, I also savored quiet afternoon shade with a novel. I enjoyed thrillers like Day of the Jackal, and science fiction, like 2001 A Space Odyssey. The latter was first a film, which I saw as a wide-eyed ten-year-old with my father. Even at the time, I knew Arthur C. Clark had written both the screenplay and the novel, which I devoured trying to understand the metaphysical themes of the film. At first, I thought I did.
Back in school, I read literary classics, textbooks and then academic writing all the way through graduate school and into my professional life. This sort of non-fiction feeds my mind now, but as a child it was the texts of popular culture that tasted like dessert. Sweetest of all was my Mad Magazine collection hidden away at the cottage for summer consumption. The iconoclastic writers and artists of Mad introduced me to a satirical attitude towards movies, TV, consumer culture, and political life. With them, nothing was sacred. In fact, it was the “usual gang of idiots” who introduced me to “201 Minutes of a Space Idiocy”, and inspired me to write and perform my own plays with my best friend, Steve. They were the ones that opened up a different way of looking at the world than my everyday home life. And that has stayed with me, always.



