Back in 1968, Fred Rogers started a challenging career in television to “make goodness attractive.” That was back when televisions were the size of washing machines, and you could count the number of children’s television programs on one hand. Although the children’s media landscape has changed dramatically, Fred Rogers’ values have not. In my study of children’s apps, I’ve found that Fred’s...
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“Early career” is not a phrase you’d readily apply to an educator whose work has brought him to locales as diverse as Chicago, Florida, and New Zealand, and who’s authored one book, with another one in the works. But Brian Puerling, the director of education technology at Chicago’s Catherine Cook School, has done all of the above. At age 32,...
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James Alex Bonus and Alanna Peebles have spent hours watching and analyzing children’s TV shows. Graduate students in communication science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Bonus and Peebles are interested in how children ages 3 to 5 understand narrative. “When we make these shows for kids, there’s a lot of mental obstacles for them that we might not recognize,” Bonus said. Research...
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Anna Ly, one of the Fred Rogers Center’s Early Career Fellows, was working on her graduate degree at Stanford when a presentation from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center gave her a eureka moment. The center presented a prototype of a videoconferencing app they created with the Nokia Research Center called Story Visit, which lets far away parents or grandparents read “Sesame...
Read MoreThis post was originally published at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and appears here with permission. This spring, I was given an extremely exciting opportunity when the Fred Rogers Center named me an Early Career Fellow. The mission of the Fred Rogers Center is to advance the fields of early learning and children’s media by acting as a catalyst for communication,...
Read MoreLast year Common Sense Media found that in a two-year period, the average amount of time children spend using mobile devices had tripled. Kids of all ages (including those younger than 2) spend increasing amounts of time playing games and using apps on the family iPad. And among the debates about whether this digital deluge is good or bad for kids,...
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To engage in real debate, critics of screen time need to name the apps they are concerned about, argues Children's Technology Review Editor Warren Buckleitner, a presenter at the 2014 Fred Forward Conference. He names 10 specific research questions about kids and apps. The Great Screen Debate is stuck. Despite the forward thinking of the joint position statement on children and...
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It's been quite a week in the children's media world. While preparing for the week ahead last Sunday, I noticed an article on Huffington Post that was spreading virally through my friends on Facebook. The article was a call to ban all hand-held devices from children under the age of 12. Backing up the claim, the author cited a long...
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Do technology tools and interactive media like iPads, cameras, or e-readers, belong in the early childhood classroom? If so, how should early childhood educators be using them? What are the best ways and when are the best times to use technology with very young kids in a classroom setting? The NAEYC-Fred Rogers Center position statement is meant to help educators answer...
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Do technology tools and interactive media like iPads, cameras, or e-readers, belong in the early childhood classroom? If so, how should educators be using them? At the Fred Rogers Center, we believe technology and interactive media do have the potential to help children learn in the early years, but only if they are used in intentional, developmentally appropriate ways. Here are...
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