If you take a walk through your local Best Buy or Home Depot, after just a few minutes browsing you will notice a variety of smart devices available to consumers at a relatively low cost. For example, a 32-inch Smart HDTV can be purchased for around $150. These smart devices are enabled with Wi-Fi access and many of them preloaded with a variety of streaming media applications that consumers can log into and begin viewing upon unpacking the device. Not even appliances are immune to the smart device revolution. Many refrigerators are being built with touchscreens on the doors and with network connectivity. Soon, we may be watching “television” from our refrigerator while we are preparing dinner.

As a result of the smart device revolution, today’s youth have left live television behind. Media consumption has shifted from television to digital streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and others. Children are consuming media via device, whether it is music via Spotify, Pandora, Soundcloud, Tidal and others or video via the iTunes Store, WatchESPN, Netflix or Amazon Prime. As such, digital reading platforms have begun to emerge to take advantage of the connected child. Tech-savvy parents and teachers can provide children and students with anytime-anyplace access to thousands of age-appropriate titles, which in the near future, could be accessed by toddlers from a touch-screen on the refrigerator door.

What does this mean in the world of the young child? What does it mean for children that are learning to read and interact with a variety of forms of literacy materials? Gone are the days of sitting your child on the kitchen floor with building blocks or storybook. Instead, they are plugged into the matrix and have connections to any number of streaming media platforms. How will children interact with literacy in the environment of the smart home? What does this mean for teaching kids the alphabet or their numbers? How does this impact the way that we can teach kids how to read, write, communicate and be literate in this streaming world? Do we need to have different expectations for what it means to be literate in our world today? Are expected expectations for student achievement relevant and attainable in this new age that we’re living in? Questions such as these must be considered to ensure that teachers are educating youth for the world they will live in tomorrow.

My colleague, Dr. Kathy Roskos, and I were invited to Montreal during the summer of 2015 to share our research and work around the use of ebooks to support early literacy at the Digital Literacy for Preschoolers: Maximizing the Benefits of eBooks for Emergent Literacy conference.

The outcome of this conference was to build a better understanding of the state of the evidence and a develop a new section of the Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development that will be useful for families, professionals and policy makers.

The Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development is produced by the Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development (CEECD) and the Strategic Knowledge Cluster on Early Child Development (SKC-ECD). Respectively based at the Université de Montréal and Université Laval (Quebec, Canada), these two organizations have built over the years a solid network of international experts who gather, synthesize and comment, in their respective domain of expertise, the most up-to-date scientific knowledge available on the development of young children, from conception to age five.

Recently, the Technology in early childhood education section of the Encyclopedia was published. Dr. Roskos and I contributed a piece titled Teaching Early Literacy with E-books: Emerging Practices. I hope it helps shed some light around what we know and what we don’t know about teaching with ebooks.

Educators should exemplify how an individual uses digital tools and resources to become a skilled communicator, collaborator, and devoted lifelong learner. Modeling the use of a range of transliteracy tools is something teachers need to engage in on a daily basis. Most educators are familiar with Twitter, however many wonder how to actually put it into classroom practice. Twitter brainstorming is one way to begin, even in the early grades, because it does not require students to have individual Twitter accounts. Read the rest of this entry…

In their most basic form, children’s ebooks are computer files that act much like a book. They have traditional conventions like a title, pages, and chapters. However, they also can contain illustrations and hotspots that provide a navigation mechanism for the reader. A deeper look at children’s ebooks reveals a more complex form, a type of software that includes animations, sounds, videos, and a read-aloud function. Read the rest of this entry…

2014 OSBA Capital Conference

Session Handout

It’s About Learning, Not Shiny Tech Tools

Tuesday, November 11, 2014 | 2:00 PM

Districts are investing lots of money in digital technologies. But if it’s about the learning, not the tools, what does that mean for students? What does it mean for teachers and administrators? What does it mean for the role of the board? This highly-interactive discussion will focus on student agency and empowerment, global connection and collaboration, and deeper, more cognitively-complex thinking tasks. Within those areas, what should board members be looking for? What questions should they be asking? How can they help support innovative efforts? We’ll hit all of this and more.

2014 OSBA Capital Conference

Session Handout

Modernizing Education for Student Success

Monday, November 10, 2014 | 9:00 AM

In this day and age, it feels like education is not in the hands of the true stakeholders: the students.  Let’s discuss ways as educators, administrators, school board members, etc. that we can get education back to where it belongs. We will discuss ways that we can move away from the Industrial Age of education and take education and modernize it for our the benefit of our students and communities.

Here’s a nice quick reference visual that lays out the major changes taking place in Ohio education from 2010-2016.

This morning, Wes Fryer tweeted something that he probably thought was a pretty simple and routine update…

…but it got me to thinking…

which lead into a pretty interesting asynchronous conversation that I think I need to document and remember… Read the rest of this entry…

From the NAEYC ECETech Listserv:

As it takes so much time to locate and evaluate apps, I was wondering:

-Do you have favorite app review sites? (there are so many now, and video reviews cropping up, so people can see apps before they buy them.)

-Do you have a system, and if you do, what is it, for listing your favorite apps to share with others?  Is your favorites list available online/can you share it? I am interested in ways others in the group are organizing this info, and to take a look at your lists, if possible.

-In schools/programs where teachers in various classrooms may be exploring and finding new apps-are there systems set up to share about these discoveries with others?

So many apps, so little time- thanks for sharing tips from your workflow about these questions.

I’m often asked to provide lists of apps for schools, districts or teachers. This is tricky because of the wide variety of apps. In general, I’d say that there are way more skill and drill type apps available (flashcards, letter games, puzzles, etc…) most likely because they are simple for app developers (non-educators most often) to create. Apps that support higher-order think skills are less in numbers. I think the most important thing for a teacher to consider is what they want their students to accomplish using the app and then consider whether an app is actually the best resource for this learning experience. I like to point admins and teachers to the SAMR model when asking them this and then try to help them discern is the are using the app as simply a substitution for something they have always done or if they are able to use the app to help redefine the learning task.

Read the rest of this entry…