Navigating How and When to Use Tech When Teaching Young Children

When we bring tech to our school, we ask, ‘how might this tool, whether it’s a robot or a tablet or something else, provide an opportunity that does not already exist in the classroom? How can it increase children’s ability to actively learn?’

The intentionality around these technology decisions was evident across both webinars. “When we bring tech to our school,” said Amy Turcotte, an early childhood tech coach at Project Eagle Head Start in Kansas City, KS, “we ask, ‘how might this tool, whether it’s a robot or a tablet or something else, provide an opportunity that does not already exist in the classroom? How can it increase children’s ability to actively learn?’” She continued, “Does learning this tool help build life skills like resilience, empathy, and problem solving?” Turcotte added that educators must consider whether the digital tools they select represent their students’ languages, thoughts, and experiences.

Panelists agreed that, while digital tools hold tremendous potential to personalize learning and offer a glimpse at worlds far beyond their classrooms, access remains uneven. According to Lydia Carlis, chief learning and impact officer at Acelero Learning, she and her colleagues consider three factors to “ensure that technology is serving as a tool for fairness rather than another source of disparity.” They determine whether all children will have access to digital tools regardless of their socioeconomic status, geography, or ability level; whether the tools are representative of the children they serve and their needs; and, “whether or not teachers can utilize the information that comes from the technology to help them support children’s learning.”

To Carlis’s last point, data collection and analysis was raised as a key leverage point for digital tools, like tablets, in early education. Sharon Huang, senior associate of family well-being and children’s development at MDRC, shared how listening sessions with early educators revealed the sense of being overwhelmed and the difficulty, and often impracticality, of continuously collecting and analyzing data for large numbers of children. She suggested that short, game-based assessment tools, like those being developed in research projects funded through MDRC, hold the potential to provide more “accurate, timely, reliable information about children’s development,” and free up more of teachers’ time for interaction and instruction.

Huang also underscored out how much the early childhood details matter when designing digital tools. “Do their classrooms have internet access?,” she asked. “In many early childhood programs the internet connection is unreliable at best. Also, if you’re asking children to listen to audio, do they need headphones? Will they be able to hear what’s happening in the middle of a noisy classroom? And, if children need to log on to their own accounts to use an app, what is the easiest way to do that?”

On a much smaller scale, Williams, the second grade teacher, recalled discovering that laptops didn’t work well with her students’ hands and switching to iPads instead. Turcotte stressed the importance of developing young children’s fine motor skills so they have the dexterity to isolate their pointer fingers and use those tablets once they do reach second grade.

To that end, I had the opportunity to participate in the second webinar, as a former kindergarten teacher at a dual language Spanish-English immersion school. I emphasized the importance of bringing early educators and researchers to the table when developing tech tools, to ensure that they’re practical for early childhood settings and truly meeting students’ needs. I also recommended using tech tools, like game-based assessments, to assess English Learners’ skills in their home language in addition to English, in order to have a more complete picture of students’ knowledge and strengths.

Overall, panelists agreed that while educators and parents have an uphill battle selecting for quality amid the abundance of content and tools, they can likely stress a bit less around children’s screen time.

“This idea of just focusing on screen time has become a less helpful concept. Screen time is only one dimension,” Radesky explained. “There’s lots of research showing that the quality of content really shapes children’s outcomes. In early childhood, higher screen time is associated with language delays, but not if kids are watching high-quality content like PBS Kids or Sesame Street, right? So that is what shows us that if you design media with kids’ needs in mind, you can have much better outcomes.”

Dore agreed. “Many researchers have started to conclude that there’s actually little evidence for a recommendation to limit children’s media use to a specific set amount of time each day,” Dore said. She suggested that caregivers and educators prioritize quality, and advised them to select programs in which educational content is relevant to the storyline or game. She also encouraged adults making tech decisions to avoid apps or tech tools with too many distracting features, and to embrace the repetition that children seek.

Dore, and other colleagues in the webinars, also promoted joint media engagement, which, as she explained, “is just a sort of fancy term for using media with children, which has been shown to promote learning.”

These interdisciplinary conversations with early childhood experts gain evergrowing import as technology rapidly evolves and makes its way into young children’s classrooms and homes. One opportunity to lend your voice to this salient dialogue will be coming later this year. As Mwenelupembe shared, NAEYC will be updating its 2012 Position Statement on Technology and Interactive Media with new guidance, including considerations around artificial intelligence and its place in the early childhood classroom. They’ll begin seeking input from members in the coming months.