Skip to main content

Channeling Positive Tablet Usage To Foster Childhood Development



“Kids spend too much time on tablets and smartphones, not enough time outside!”

“They are losing key skills because they are spending too much time on video games and apps!”

We hear statements like these constantly, but the fact is, technology is a part of our lives, including our children’s, and that isn’t likely to change. Instead of looking at tech as the ogre, why not consider the types of apps, games and programs children are using?

Research from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center shows that less than half of the screen time for kids between ages 2-10 involves “educational” material. Parents should look for more positive and productive ways for kids to interact with devices. Screen time, if monitored and channeled properly, can provide meaningful experiences and outcomes for children. 

Studies have shown that students can lose up to two months of mathematical and computational skills during summer break. Low-income students are particularly affected: they can lose over two months in critical reading skills during the summer. Low-cost, educational gaming apps can help students retain knowledge while still allowing students to enjoy time off.

When children are allowed to learn through play, there is far less time spent on behavior management. Educational gaming apps and programs allow kids to have fun while simultaneously providing critical skills and knowledge.

The entertainment value of gaming can motivate users to accomplish tasks that are normally viewed as boring. A joint NYU/CUNY study found that “well-designed games can motivate students to learn less popular subjects, such as math, and that game-based learning can actually get students interested in the subject matter—and can broaden their focus beyond just collecting stars or points.”

Many teachers have employed this practice in classroom learning; and programs and apps extend this important practice throughout the year and on the weekends for in-home learning.

Play-based learning helps kids focus on the task at hand rather than outside distractions. With games, kids can dive in and focus on problem-solving and other critical skills. Certain video games have been found to improve strategic thinking and help the brain to become more agile.

Our app, JoyTunes, acts a musical education game, with gamification supplementing traditional music pedagogy. Additionally, apps like Learn with Homer and Operation Math are helping kids improve reading, vocabulary and math skills by using spy themes, clever animations and leader boards where kids can rack up points. Learn with Homer helps early childhood learners with critical skills like converting sounds to letters, letters to words, and words to ideas through play which has been proven to help fight learning loss and increase school readiness. Similarly, Operation Math keeps kids engaged through often mundane math drills by leading them on a spy adventure while completing activities like multiplication and division.

Combining learning with the enjoyment of video gaming can help students learn across all subjects. Parents who want to ensure that their children enjoy positive screen-time should pay close attention to the types of content being downloaded. Many tech companies are working to ensure the growing amount of time children spend with apps, tablets and smartphones is not only fun but fruitful.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...
1 comment
Read more

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...
1 comment
Read more

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...
Post a Comment
Read more