Chip Donohue speaks at the podium during the “Technology During the Early Years: Reality Check” panel. (L to R: Moderator Rebecca Miller, Warren Buckleitner, Celia Huffman) Photo courtesy of Carolyn Sun
“We want to empower the child,” said Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children’s Technology Review during the “Technology in the Early Years” at the “Fostering Lifelong Learners” conference, presented by SLJ and sister-publication The Horn Book, at the Cuyahoga County (OH) Public Library on September 19. Buckleitner was joined by Chip Donohue, director of the Technology in Early Childhood (TEC) Center at the Erikson Institute and senior fellow at the Fred Rogers Center, and Celia Huffman, an early tech adopter who’d served as the Cuyahoga library youth services manager for 30 years. Together, they dug into best practices that educators, librarians, and parents are employing—and should employ—for effective technology use with young children.
Curate technology
Donohue pointed to the question he gets asked all the time—“where do we begin?”—when it comes to what sort of technology to place in the classroom, library, and early childhood centers. Start with a digital camera, he answered, calling it a “simple and quick win.”
“We’ve [all] been kind of hung up on iPads, and four years ago there weren’t iPads,” he added. “Four years from now, who knows?”
Click image to see Chip Donohue’s “Selected Resources on Technology and the Young Child.”
Adapting, gauging, and intentionality were his persistent themes, and he distilled the methodology for selecting children’s technology down to the “three Cs”: content, context, and the child. Also, he added, “the gold standard [for the right technology] is [a child’s] engagement.”
The director of TEC focused on technology that offers children “interactional [play] and social opportunities,” such as open-ended apps that he described as “apps that invite exploration, can be used by more than one child, may use a digital camera, and where the work can be saved and revisited.” Also, he touched upon apps that allow a child to author and create stories, such as: Toontastic and Toontastic Junior; My Story; Story Creator; and Sago Mini Doodlecast, an app that records your voice as you draw. Some resources he pointed to for quality app content included School Library Journal, Children’s Technology Review, and Common Sense Media.
Teachers and parents often ask Donohue for guidance on what makes up a “healthy media diet.” His response was “to practice balance” and follow your gut. “Teachers and parents…always know when enough is enough.”
Gaming: a weapon of social plaY
“The Wii is the secret weapon for a library,” said Buckleitner. Also a board member of the Flemington (NJ) Free Public Library (FFPL), he spearheaded a project to add a children’s technology center to the library. The room, called Mediatech, serves as a highly social discovery space for children and teens, and according to Carol Wachter, a senior library assistant at FFPL, it is home to 1,200 video games; cross-platform video game consoles—Wii, Xbox, Xbox 360 with Kinect, and PlayStation 3 and 4; an iPad; and several handheld game consoles.
“[Kids] can check out an EA Sports game for two weeks,” Buckleitner said, “just like a book.” Like Donohue, he encouraged using the level of children’s engagement as guidance.
Two teens used this flight simulator to replicate Charles Lindbergh’s 33-hour flight into Paris. Photo courtesy of Media Tech
Even though today the center is thriving—it offered its first programming camp this past summer—Buckleitner described the chaos and video game theft that occurred immediately after Mediatech’s opening. It took over five years to turn it around, with Wachter’s help. Despite the initial issues, Buckleitner knew if he provided enough engaging activities and material for the children, they “would be able to make the leap from destructive to constructive behavior.”
As an advocate of “Deep SIMS”—which he explained is taking “a game and a piece of technology that children love, could be Minecraft, and [letting] them go crazy with it with no failure/success metric”—he shared that kids of all ages, ethnicities, and levels get engaged, interacting with each other and the game they are playing, such as Nintendo’s Luigi’s Mansion—a scene he showed to the audience by video. See his database of children’s video game reviews in Children’s Technology Review.
He also recounted an engagement project the children’s tech space had hosted involving the county’s ties to aviator Charles Lindbergh, who had lived in Hunterdon County. The project was to re-create a flight simulation of Lindbergh’s 33-hour flight in real time with two local teens taking turns at the virtual cockpit. “They crashed twice… we had a WWII pilot help them.”
“Technology should create a place where you can pick up a tablet and try to break it,” informed Buckleitner, “and experiment with it, and learn what its limits are.”
Integrating technology into the reading process
Celia Huffman, former youth services librarian from the Cuyahoga County Public Library.
Huffman, who also now owns Youth Creative Concepts for Libraries, shared her experience developing and adapting the “One-Two-Three Read” program model for CCPL as an afterschool “school-based model that would be workable for a public library environment.”
The program, which is an adjunct to CCPL’s homework centers, according to Huffman, is a volunteer-based model that is divided into kids working one-on-one with on-site tutors and books for 30 minutes and engaging with technology and games for an additional half-hour. The technology component also integrates use of reading apps, she shared. “We’re purchasing from Reading Rockets, and we’re always looking… for apps that are coming out.”
CCPL, which has adopted the program for one of its branches, has “partnered with local school districts as partners, and the [library] provide[s] transportation” for participants in the program. Huffman shared that the library received a United Way grant this year and will use it to expand the program to another branch.
In a multi-screen world, there will always be plenty of [technology] critics, says TEC’s Donohue, and their concerns are real and legitimate—but they’re not reasons to not use technology.