HTS Summer Learning Blog: Article Alert: The Touch Screen Generation - How Children Use iPads (and a list of suggested Apps!)

My flight was delayed on the way home from Spring Break in Florida yesterday, so I set out to buy a pile of magazines to pass the time. Though I was briefly tempted by People Magazine's account of how Kate Middleton's pregnancy is progressing, the cover story of the Atlantic magazine caught my eye as a slightly more useful read: "The Touch Screen Generation: How Children Use iPads," by Hilary Rosen. It's a fascinating piece for parents of young children (and their teachers!) The link to the article can be found here.

Rosen says: "Norman Rockwell never painted "Boy Swiping Finger on Screen" and our own vision of a perfect childhood has never adjusted to accommodate that now-common tableau. Add to that our modern fear that every parenting decision may have lasting consequences—that every minute of enrichment lost or mindless entertainment indulged will add up to some permanent handicap in the future—and you have deep guilt and confusion. To date, no body of research has definitively proved that the iPad will make your preschooler smarter or teach her to speak Chinese, or alternatively that it will rust her neural circuitry—the device has been out for only three years, not much more than the time it takes some academics to find funding and gather research subjects. So what’s a parent to do?

I found her comprehensive exploration of the subject to be reassuring - of course, I read it through the lens of a tech teacher, but I do think ultimately, iPads can be a wonderful tool/toy for little people. In moderation. There is much to ponder in this article, but a few things struck me in particular:

Zoned Out - or Engaged?: It is clear that many parents worry that the "zoned out" state of young children engaged in playing with an App (or watching TV) is a bad thing. In fact, some experts argue that the attention given to iPads (or TV) is much like that of someone deep in a book - you can be still, undistracted, and mentally active.

The Power of Play: The Swedish team of Emil Ovemar and Bjorn Jeffery has become one of the most successful App design teams on the planet with the "Toca" series. They used the following quote from the 1973 book "The Power of Play" as the inspiration behind their Apps:

"What is it that often puts the B student ahead of the A student in adult life, especially in business and creative professions? Certainly it is more than verbal skill. To create, one must have a sense of adventure and playfulness. One needs toughness to experiment and hazard the risk of failure. One has to be strong enough to start all over again if need be and alert enough to learn from whatever happens. One needs a strong ego to be propelled forward in one’s drive toward an untried goal. Above all, one has to possess the ability to play!"

We have been choosing educational Apps for our PreK and K program at HTS through an "is it educational?" lens, so have primarily pre-reading and early numeracy options. But play isn't always strictly "educational"... so perhaps we should mix it up with Apps that inspire joy and creativity as well. A thought to ponder...

Everything in Moderation: Perhaps the notion that time spent reading is not necessarily always better than screen time. Both can be useful ways for little people to spend their time... Like everything else in life, time on an iPad is great in moderation. In the article, Rosen says: In her excellent book "Screen Time" the journalist Lisa Guernsey lays out a useful framework—what she calls the three C’s—for thinking about media consumption: content, context, and your child. She poses a series of questions—Do you think the content is appropriate? Is screen time a “relatively small part of your child’s interaction with you and the real world?”—and suggests tailoring your rules to the answers, child by child.

There is far more to consider in this article, and I would suggest anyone with little people and an iPad at home read it.

Rosen notes that there are now over 40,000 Educational Apps currently available (no wonder I can't seem to keep up!). Following are a few that Rosen mentions in her article, available in the Apple Store:

Talking Baby Hippo