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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Michael
Well, good morning everybody, or good afternoon or good evening to my two special guests today, Deborah Rosenfield and Ashley Lewis Presser. Thank you so much for this opportunity to get to learn from the work that you do. You both work for the Education Development Center over in the United States, so is that, so would that be still in, correct, in Vermont? Is that in Vermont?
Deborah
- I live in Vermont.
- Yep.
- Ashley lives in New York, and Education Development Center is based in Massachusetts, but has offices in New York City, Washington D.C., various Chicago, and then also around the world in various satellite offices.
- Awesome.
- So this is the Vermont office.
- Yeah.
- Both of you have been, you know, involved in working towards researching technology in early childhood. And so, like I said, I've just been looking forward to this, you know, for a long time, you know, to meeting, I met Deborah earlier before, now I'm meeting you, Ashley, and it's a real pleasure, I can just say. So for those who are joining us today, you know, you're in for a real treat. Like I said, I can't wait to hear what you have for us today, so I'll leave it all in your hands. It's all up to you.
- Great. Sounds good.
Well, we're excited to be here. We're planning to talk about educational technology in early childhood, and we thought we'd frame it around the who, what, when, why, and how.
So a brief agenda, we wanna introduce ourselves and acknowledge the context of educational technology in early childhood, what might be bringing you to the talk today to listen to this, get into what makes high quality educational technology, and then a specific example, the Preschool Data Toolbox, that we've been working a lot on.
Ashley's the mastermind behind and is a great example of high quality educational technology in early childhood, and then we'll wrap up with some key takeaways. So you mentioned that we both work at the Education Development Center.
We're here in the United States, mostly on the East coast. We do education research for one of the centers within Education Development Center called the Center for Children and Technology, where we design and implement and study the effectiveness of educational tools, especially digital ones.
We develop guides and frameworks for selecting high quality resources and how to best use them to reap the educational benefits. We focus on STEM, literacy, and computational thinking, and we typically work with under-resourced communities.
And just a little bit of background about myself, Before coming to EDC, which was a ways back at this point, I did teach first, fourth, and eighth grade algebra, decided that I wanted to be behind the scenes rather than up in front of the classroom, and joined EDC as a curriculum writer for an elementary math textbook.
And I really like to think about how kids actually learn when designing materials for them, and so I went back to school to learn about how children develop, about how they learn, specifically within math education, so in the design of the tools that we work on and the way that we study it and what we're looking for in terms of effectiveness. I'm always keeping in mind the most natural way that children learn about things.
And I also think it's important to mention that I have four young kids ranging from five to 12, so I get a close look at a lot of how these things work for them and how they're learning as well, which a nice lens into our work as well. I'll have Ashley introduce herself a bit too.
- Sure. So my research really focuses on developing and testing STEM interventions that strategically leverage technology, as we would say, like not technology for the sake of technology.
Much of this work really focuses on preschool math and preschool science, and as we develop these interventions, we like to employ a design-based research approach that really solicits and values the experiences of teachers as we make decisions about what things are working and what things really need to be changed, and then sometimes making radical changes based on that feedback, and then we run studies to see how students learn from those experiences.
- Yes. So before we jump into educational technology, we thought it was important to start with the context of the world at the moment, especially as it relates to education, that we are still in this pandemic, this now endemic pandemic that, for a number of years, has interrupted learning and led to a lot of learning loss.
Here in the U.S. there have been headlines about, I was gonna say headaches, that too, but headlines about how 20 years worth of progress in math and reading scores have been wiped out during these past couple years, as kids' learning has been so interrupted. We had a lot of time out of school, kids at home doing remote learning without much guidance, and as all that was unfolding, teachers were being asked to do so much more without the preparation for doing it, while they also had their own care taking responsibilities in many cases.
And so then there's this mental health crisis that's built up with those circumstances, and I just read a headline that was saying that the toll on teachers has actually been greater psychologically than even in the healthcare sector, which is not surprising, but also quite alarming. So when you think about all of that, where do we begin?
It's a little, it sounds pretty dire. I don't mean to paint such a dire picture, but I do think that it gives us a nice opportunity to think about where educational technology fits into that, because educational technology has the potential to do things at scale, to be individualized, and to engage learners, give them lots of practice opportunities.
There are a lot of ways that it can address these challenges that have been happening, but when it's done well, when it's not done well, it's just another thing in this vast landscape of stuff being thrown at people, and too many choices often makes things more complicated, not less.
So technology's everywhere, it's here to stay, and we know that kids are spending a time on it. Even at a young age, they're spending around two hours a day on screens. So that's an opportunity, because we have the audience there, but also important to know what is in front of them to use that time wisely.
And in app stores, there're over 500,000 apps at this point that label themselves as educational without any kind of standards or guidance of what, or definitions of what we mean by educational, so how anyone is supposed to make choices what to use in an effective way, selecting high quality things is really a huge struggle in this area.
So with that in mind, that's what we're trying to help with. How do you start thinking about, in this vast landscape, what can you do and how can you do it, and all those questions. So try and frame it with these four Hs, four Ws, and a how.
So first, who? Who is even using the technology when it's being used for educational purposes? And we typically think that it's the kids who are gonna pick up this device, use this resource, and learn something, and it's definitely not how it typically works. I put this picture of the bicycle with the idea of the bicycle and educational technology, they're tools.
They're more the object, they're not the actual end product. And so you, if you were to just hand a bicycle to a child, they wouldn't know what to do with it. They don't know how to ride it yet. They need some support. They need some introduction.
They need some guidance. And eventually, yes, the goal is that they can ride it on their own and then they can do new things and more advanced things because they have this tool to guide them. So when we think about who the users are, yes, we're aiming towards the rider of the bike or the child, but they're not doing this on their own.
The caregivers and peers and educators around them are also the users and they're, importantly, the curators, the ones selecting the resources, and so they should try them out in advance and alongside children and incorporate them into the experiences that are meaningful and make sense to children so that that cannot just be an isolated experience, but extend across settings.
And importantly, a lot of these apps, even the ones that are labeled as educational, they have advertisements, distracting features, bells and whistles that can really draw children in but actually detract from the learning, and so when an adult is there having previewed it or doing it alongside, they can help keep the focus where it's intended. All right, so we know who's using it and selecting, but what are they actually looking for in high quality resources?
And so, there are various ways of thinking about this. This box on the right side, one of our projects at EDC, at the Center for Children and Technology, put together this list within a larger document that was part of work that they were doing for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that had some guidelines around how you might select the technology tools and the media that you would use, considering the goals for the children, using it socially, with other people, encouraging collaboration and communication, opportunities to be creative and culturally responsive, which culturally responsive means being aware of the users in terms of the languages they speak, the way they look, the way that they use media, the way they interact with each other, what learning looks like within that context, so that it can be picked up and used effectively.
A recent article by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, who's a big leader in this field, she talked about looking at four pillars when you're evaluating a digital tool, and these are active learning, engagement in the learning process, meaningful learning, and social interaction. And these are sort of some of the same things that I've just been saying.
You know, instead of being a passive resource, you're actively engaged in doing some problem solving, doing some task. You're engaged because it's fun, it's play-based, it's meaningful, it connects to experiences in your life, and it's social. You're playing together, you're watching together, you're using it to communicate something.
To connect home and school is a really nice thing so that parents know what's happening at school and kids can continue their learning as they go home and as they're in the community.
And I just wanted to add, within all of this, it's implied this play-based learning, but often when we think about digital tools, we forget that there's still the possibility of it being play-based, cause we think so much in early childhood, play-based has to be hands on, but when it's open-ended and it's flexible and kids can come with their own questions and engage in their own ways and at their own pace, it really maintains a lot of the features of play-based learning. And so these resources, for young kids in particular, should make sure to maintain those features, because that's actually how young children learn.
All right, when? I think this is an important question that often gets overlooked.
We think like there's so much potential and it's so available and there's such opportunity to use this ed tech and we're excited and it's scalable and we have this huge problem in front of us, but there are a lot of times when it's not actually appropriate to use it because it's interfering or getting in the way of valuable experiences that young children can have, like building relationships with peers and teachers and family members, so, and it can distract from the focal content in the way that we were saying before, like too many bells and whistles. It's just to be fun and it's not actually honing in on the actual concept that they're trying to learn.
So I think those are important to keep in mind, because these are still young kids who generally want them exploring out in the world and all those kinds of things, but there are these good reasons to use it also that do feed into what we were saying earlier about the context of this pandemic and all the learning that has been lost that we wanna help with.
And so the Brookings report, the Brookings Institute put out a report recently where they put, said there's basically four main reasons to use educational technology, and that's to scale up high quality instruction, to facilitate differentiated instruction, to expand practice opportunities, and to increase learner engagement, and all of those are very beneficial.
So thinking about those things when deciding when to use a resource and when not to. Okay, and overlapping with the when is why to use ed tech? You know, for those purposes why, instead of some other hands-on and non-digital method?
In addition to being able to scale it and to set up classroom spaces or learning spaces so that some kids are entertained doing one thing while the teacher's doing another thing, sometimes technology does actually clearly demonstrate concepts and support the learning, when it's, which, in a way, that's not possible without it.
So some of this is just in terms of accessibility for students who benefit from audio being instead of having to look at written text or more visual or being able to like follow what they need to get what they need as they're going to differentiate in that way. But you can also speed up or slow down a process.
Like, in science, if you're trying to watch, you know, plant growth, you're gonna wait a month if you are doing it in person, but if you wanna see a process unfold more quickly, you could do that through a digital resource.
You can have a more controlled environment and factors like, if you're learning about ramps, you know, and you're doing it in a classroom, it's a lot harder to actually make sure that you have the right incline and there's not, the carpet isn't all bumpy and the cars that they're using, the wheels are not all stuck.
You know, all those kinds of things that actually happen when you're in the real world, you can control for some of those and actually see what difference it makes, what the material of the incline is, or the features you're paying attention to, and you can zoom in and zoom out and show parts separate from the whole, all those kinds of things that are harder to do in real life.
So there are some clear ways that educational technology supports learning. All right, and finally, once you've thought about what you wanna use, when you're gonna use it, why you're gonna use it, who's using it, how do you actually go using it so that you make sure that you're getting the maximum benefit out of it?
So I'm probably repeating myself at this point, but you wanna make sure that it's aligning to the content. You're not just like throwing it in there randomly. It's part of an actual curriculum. It's part of an actual learning sequence.
It connects to what's happening before and after. It's within the routines that kids know at school or at at home. They get to use it and then talk about it. They get to use it with someone else.
They get to use it to show what they've been doing to someone else. It leads to more questions. It's a launching point.
You know, you watch a show and then you're like, "Oh, I wanna try that out at home." Those kinds of things.
And communicating across settings. There are a lot of tools for documenting student learning that then the child gets to record their voice talking about, "I made this picture and this is what it shows" and the parent can respond too, and it really fosters a nice communication about what's actually happening, and then it makes it easier for the parent when they get home and say, "How was school today?" and they say, "Good" and they don't tell you anything, say, "Oh, but tell me about this thing that I saw." All right, so that was a lot and it's very abstract, which is why we thought it'd be really nice to ground it in a specific example, and Ashley's gonna take it away for a little bit, talking about the Preschool Data Toolbox, which is a great example of all those things.
Ashley
- Hi everybody. I'm really excited to share some information about the Preschool Data Toolbox. So this is a digital app that is available in the Apple store and Android store, and the goal is to really help young children learn about data collection and analysis.
So in a classroom setting, the time spent collecting, organizing, and creating visual displays can take a lot of time, and we know from some of our colleagues that the ideal way to approach data collection analysis and the discussion about it is you spend approximately a third of your time collecting and creating the display and two thirds of your time actually talking about it and looking at it and determining what it means.
So we created this digital tool as a teacher-facing app that the teacher could hold and the children also can play with it, but it's not a game, per-se.
It's meant to be a tool that teachers will use along with their students. So the goal was really to create a simplified way to create these displays of data and to be able to look at graphs quickly and easily and also make sure that those are really well-integrated into kids' hands-on experiences.
We've built a lot of these activities to make ensure that there's hands-on experiences, there's physical activity, and that it integrates with literacy and social-emotional learning.
So for example, children will read a book with their teacher and then they'll make graphs based on things that happen in the book, or in one of our activities there is, they say, they vote on how they feel, so they say in the morning, "Do I feel happy, sad?" and then they create a graph about that and then they do it at the end of the day and compare the two graphs. So we're trying to also make sure this integrates into all the other things that teachers are trying to experience or have their children experience throughout the preschool years.
- Can you go to the next one?
- Yeah. So the intervention itself, there's this app, and within it, you'll see in the upper right hand corner there's a teacher's guide.
The teacher's guide is both embedded in the app itself but also online, and what that includes is nine investigations with each investigation having three to five activities within it, and the goal really is to foster preschoolers' math and computational thinking in a way that's fun and engaging and developmentally appropriate.
So as I said, this is a really teacher-facing app that allows teachers to create these representations and engage in data talks. We even like for the teachers to call the children "data scientists." So they put on their data scientist cap and role play what it is to be a data scientist and the children really enjoy that.
You wanna go to the next one? Okay, so of those nine investigations, six we've already written out, but we also encourage teachers to create their own investigations based on what's going on in their classroom, to build on something that isn't data related that could be, and then it culminates in what we call a data story.
So the data story, and I'll show you an example, is an opportunity for the teacher to pull in several graphs and annotate them and then have it almost like a presentation or a book that they can review with their students over time or to share with parents that they would like to do that.
So if you can see on your screen, we have a couple QR codes. So there the app is free in either the App Store or the Google Play store. So I'll just pause right there so you can grab your tablet or your phone and it'll link directly to where to download it. Okay. Wanna try the next one? So the next one, is a link to the teachers' guide that is on the web.
There's also one embedded in the app, and I'll take a moment to just acknowledge WGBH was our partner in this project, and they did a wonderful job of making this really play-based. So you might be wondering, "Okay, so great, we have this wonderful app, we can do all these things, but what does this really look like for preschoolers?"
Obviously, they're not doing really advanced statistics or anything like that. So for children this age, what are we thinking about? We're thinking about whether they can understand why you would collect data, how the data relates to a question you would ask, and those questions really have to be developmentally appropriate and interesting to the children themselves, something that's meaningful in their world.
So, you know, like we often ask them, for example, a popular create-your-own activity is based on a book called, "Which Would You Rather Be?" and the entire book is like, "Would you rather be a polar bear or seal?" and like kids really love this book.
It's really exciting. It's really quick. You can make a graph pretty easily, and then kids can talk about why did they like one thing for another. And it seems a little bit silly, but it's a great way to pull kids in and get them excited about collecting data and seeing that this doesn't have to be like a huge process. It's just really fun and answers a question. Who likes being a polar bear more than a seal? And that's great for a four-year-old. So those are a couple.
- My.
- Go ahead.
- Sorry to interrupt for a second, but yesterday I was in the car with my five-year-old twins and our next door neighbor who's also five, and they had just read this book at school and they were in the car and they were making up their own questions, "Would you rather live in the desert or in the Arctic?" and I was like, "This is great. They're taking this idea and going further with it." And I was like, "Would you rather be able to swim all day or hike a mountain?" You know, they were just coming up with everything and they were raising their hands to vote amongst the three of them, so it does seem like they really latched onto an idea like that.
- Yeah, so it's, and it lets them play on their imagination, too. Like I can pretend to be in the desert or in the ocean. So we also want them to think about like how you would classify or organize data?
And by that, yes you can do it in the app, but we also really encourage them to do that with lots of hands-on materials, sorting things, physical movement. So in one of the activities, they get a card, and then they have to sort themselves based on something about that animal. So like how does that animal move? Does it swim? Does it hop? Does it run?
And then they go to the place, the corner of the room where that label is, and then they can sort themselves a different way after that. So those are just a couple examples of what it means for a four-year-old to do data science.
They're also representing those data things with objects, with tally marks, with boxes, and eventually that goes into bar graphs and things like that. They can also represent data in different ways, like Venn diagrams. We've had teachers do that, and some other ways that they can organize the information they have. So it's flexible, and it can be really fun for them. Can we go to the next one?
- Sure.
- So one of the things that's really important with supporting data collection analysis is it's not easy for kids, right?
So we know that they need the scaffolding and we want these investigations to really help kids represent those like concrete objects, the pictures, the numbers. This digital tool is helping them to organize that and kind of focus their attention on how many are in each category?
Can we compare the categories? How do we, like what do we think this means? You know, if you find out how many kids are wearing sweaters versus not sweaters, in the summer, it's gonna be drastically different than it's in the winter.
And so having kids think about like, "Oh right, so more kids are wearing sweaters cause it's really cold outside, but if you lived in Florida, that might not be true." So like getting them to think of like, "Why do I wanna collect this data? Why is this important?" is a really critical part. We really want them to make this interesting, and those data talks to be really as rich as they can possibly be.
- Sorry.
- So one of the things that we've done is, for every investigation, there's a set series of steps, which I'll show you in a minute. We've done that to make it really helpful for the teacher.
So it's not just about the scaffolding for the child, but we've found that there's some supports that teachers really need in order to do this effectively. And, you know, for teachers to really think about in these digital displays, like when do you use them?
Like why am I making this graph? Are kids gonna understand how the question I'm asking relates to the data? How can we make sure it's not too overwhelming? So for example, when we designed the app, we set a limit of seven categories that they could pick, because anything larger than that and it just became too confusing, you couldn't really tell what was going on in the graph.
So we encouraged teachers to be really mindful about how many categories they're selecting there and then what they're thinking about in the data. Can you go to the next one? So one of the things that we think about with the app that's really nice is that it helps us address some common errors. So you'll see in the top there, you have all these cards with different animals, right?
But the problem is that the whale and the flamingo, the cards themselves are bigger. It's not that there's more animals, but if you just sort of like looked at the height of it, it looks like the large, actually that there's more of them, when in fact, there's only three in that category and that medium and small have four, so they actually have more than the largest.
So that's a really common challenge for young kids is they equate size with more, when really we want them to count the number of objects.
So on the bottom, you'll see here this is also a common thing. So the child has lined everything up and it really looks like there's more red than there is purple, but if you actually line it up in the, like in a graph or in a grid, we've even used like a grid on the floor where the children can stand in it or you can put objects there to make it really, really clear the one-to-one correspondence between the object and the location of the representation.
So those are some common areas we've tried to address in the app and prevent and bring teachers' attention to as well. So here are the different steps. So we really want every investigation focused first on the question, and a question that's answerable by that data, and then make it really quick and easy for the teacher and the children to collect and organize the data, and then as they look at those graphs, to analyze and interpret the data.
So we've added a couple little tools which we'll show you on a video that allows the teacher to, say, draw on the screen. There are some data talk questions at the bottom. There are different ways that you can sort the data and there are different ways that you can show the representation on the screen.
- Let's see if this works. Yeah, I may not have selected the button for sharing audio, in which case I'll un-share my screen and re-share it. So tell me if you're not hearing it.
- It looks frozen on my end.
- Wait, wait. There it's going.
- I don't hear the audio though.
- Don't hear it? Okay, sorry. Let me stop the share and then I'll re-share it. Okay. Share sound this time. Got it. All right. All right.
- What do we wear investigation?
To find lesson plans for the investigations, click on the teacher's guide link in the upper right hand corner. Once you've reviewed the lesson plans, you can start creating graphs by selecting the purple button in the middle of the screen. Select to the first investigation called "What Do We Wear?" In this investigation, children will make object graphs using an attribute of clothing to sort, graph, and discuss what children are wearing. Start by telling children that they will be doing what data scientists do, collecting and thinking about data.
In the first activity of this investigation, create a graph focused on features of children's own clothing. For example, do you have a zipper or do you have a button? Let's look at how to make these graphs in the app. To start a new session, tap the plus button. Enter a session name and press the green check mark. Tap the research question you wanna focus on, for example, "Do you have a zipper?" and press the green check mark.
Tap the blue box to add categories. Each investigation allows you to choose between two to seven categories and add images of your own using the camera icon. You'll use the camera icon in other investigations, too. For this research question, "Do you have a zipper?" we'll have just two categories. In this case, the zipper or no zipper icons. Tap on the two categories and then click the green check mark button.
Tap the blue box to select a range. You can select a range of zero to five, zero to 10, or zero to 20 for this investigation. Pick a range that provides enough space to include all children from your group. For example, if you have nine children, selecting a range of zero to 10 might work, but if you have 13 children, you might want to select a range of zero to 20 in case all children are counted in one category. Now, add data by tapping on the categories.
Press the plus or minus buttons to increase or reduce the count in that category. After data has been added, click the green button at the top. This analysis screen has four buttons at the bottom to help you work with the data as you engage children in a data talk. The slider button will allow you to change between having pictures for each data point on the graph with the slider to the left, to solid blocks with the slider in the middle, to a solid bar graph with the slider to the right.
The sorting button will allow you to sort your graph data into ascending order, descending order, or some other order that you create by dragging the columns. The discuss button will bring discussion questions to the bottom of the screen to help you during data talks with the children. Press the arrow button to go to the next discussion question.
Press the draw button. Now you can select from three colors to draw on the graph with your finger. After drawing on the screen, the drawings can be hidden by touching the eye icon, going back with the arrow icon, or deleting the drawing with a trash icon.
At the end of the activity, the children will see this celebration screen. Repeat this process with the same or different research questions, so that you have two to four graphs focused on children's clothing attributes.
Have a data talk about each graph. In this investigation's second activity, your data scientists will sort and graph clothing cards or clothing from the dramatic play area. For example, create a graph of cold weather and warm weather clothing. So far, data scientists have focused on graphing two categories. This activity is a good opportunity to add a third or fourth category.
In activity three, data scientists will compare two graphs. Select two sessions for comparison and click the green compare button. Rotate the tablet to compare the two graphs side-by-side.
You can compare two graphs of the same activity that were made by two different groups of children or compare graphs from two different activities. Comparing graphs is challenging for young children. Start by asking children to say what they see in each graph separately.
Then, ask what is similar and different in the graphs. During this data talk, use the draw feature to help children compare the graphs. This is a good opportunity to compare the same data displayed with two different ranges.
For more information, please visit WGBH's firstaidstudios.org site.
- So that's an example of one of our investigations. We have videos for all the investigations that we created, so if you're interested in all the others, we can put a link in to show you where those are. Can we?
- Yep.
- Go to the next one. So I also just wanted to highlight the other types of investigations. So we have the create your own, which is a really quick way to create a graph or a chart and then you can compare those charts. And then the design your data story, I wanted to give you an example of that. So as I said before, this is where you're investigating based on a theme.
So there's multiple tally charts or graphs, and then you sort of create a book, you add text, and then you can describe like what the question was, what categories you picked, and what you learned from the investigation, and it displays on the screen kind of like a slideshow, or you can print it up like a book. So here's just an example. So there was a water unit, and let's say the first investigation was "What's your favorite precipitation?"
And then at the bottom here, there's like a place to add some text that says, "Our class voted to find out what types of precipitation, rain, snow, sleet, or hail the data scientists prefer" and then it displays the graph on the next page, and there's a little blurb that says like what they did. So they voted and they had a data talk. We discovered that the most children like snow followed by rain and hail.
The least children like sleet. So that's just, you know, it's pretty simple. It's still something you could read as a book, but it's engaging, and the kids are really invested in it because that's what they chose to do, and they were able to do that. So then they would the, it could extend into the next new investigation. Can you do the slide?
- Yep.
- Which is, they investigated how much water do different animals drank? So they like looked up how much each animal would need. They created a graph, and they noticed in their data talk that the bigger animals needed more water than the smaller animals. So that's, you know, it's pretty simple, but it's really exciting and fun for a four-year-old.
Can you go to the next one?
And then the next one, this was a related science experiment where they had a number of objects and they did an experiment where they would see which objects sank and which ones floated, and then they created this tally chart here and they said they discovered more objects sank and fewer objects floated. We wondered what makes things float. So that's another thing is, when you're thinking about answering a question, sometimes it leads to more questions or stuff you just don't know, so it's a great way to kinda inspire curiosity about other things that they might wanna know about or do. So that's just an example of the different kinds of things that you can do in the Preschool Data Toolbox.
- And it's hard to see from these graphics, but in the app, it looks like a book, and you can actually print it out and the kids can have their own book, too, to remember what they did and to share with other people.
- Yeah, so we, you know, we were hoping that this would really be something that would help make a meaningful contribution to preschools because we discovered that there really wasn't anything like this for preschools that was intended to be really user-friendly and simple and not wordy, so you didn't have to know how to read in order to look at it, which is a really important thing. We also wanted to design it so that it was intuitive for teachers and we actually found it was more intuitive for the kids who picked on up on it quickly and often were teaching their teachers what to do.
And that, you know, you could use this with a wide range of young children. So if you have a classroom with three-year-olds in it, they can do some things, you just have to scale back a little bit of what they're doing. Whereas if kids are really advanced, you can have them do more and you can just adapt it that way. So we hope that this app provided those affordances that are not typically available in preschool classrooms.
- Yeah, and just a final thing to say, just to wrap everything up. Thank you Ashley. That was great. Just some key takeaways to reiterate some of the things we were talking about that ed tech has potential to address learning loss cause it's scalable and can be differentiated for students with different strengths and needs. It should remain play-based and engage learners in active and meaningful social learning.
It can support relationship building and connect home and school, continuing and sharing learning across settings, supplement, not replace, hands-on learning, and thoughtfully selected, supported, and integrated to facilitate learning of target concepts. So when this is posted, we will try and share the links, since this won't be clickable to some of the things that we've mentioned in here and some related articles. And thank you so much and feel free to contact us with any questions and stay in touch.
Michael
- Well thank you both Ashley and Deborah for your valuable time and expertise today. It has been, like for me myself, I'm sure for those who are watching, a real pleasure and a privilege to learn from the work that you do, which is so valuable in trying to help early childhood practitioners with technology use in early childhood education successfully and in an effective way in their learning environment.
So thank you so much for the bottom of my heart to you for your time today. Thank you so much. And I would also just like to maybe extend an invitation to both of you to maybe possibly future meetings like this in the new year, and also to like, maybe if you'd like to add to some, you know, to contribute to, you know, any sort of work content that you would like to add to my articles that I write. I don't know if you've been seeing, reading much of my work, Ashley or Deborah on my website, but I write a lot about, you know, digital play-based learning and digital strategies in early childhood education. So if you'd like to add to that in any way, I'm, you know, more than happy to have that contribution from both of you at any time. So I won't hold up too much more of your time just to say.
- It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
- Thank you so much. Very much appreciated, both to you, Ashley, and to you Deborah, and enjoy the rest of your evening.
- Thank you so much!
- And your morning.
- Will do.
- Thank you guys.
- Thank you.
- I'll see you.
- Bye.