Dr. Perry: That's actually a really good question. Preschool children are still having significant cognitive growth. In a very real sense, children think differently than adults. This is so because their brains have not yet completely developed. So to tape a conversation and replay it for an adult means something entirely different than when a three-year-old hears their voice on a tape. These experiences can be very positive and mind-expanding for a child — as long as they are done at the right time.
Children need real-life experiences with real people to truly benefit from available technologies. Technologies should be used to enhance curriculum and experiences for children. Children have to have an integrated and well-balanced set of experiences to help them grow into capable adults that can handle social-emotional interactions as well as develop their intellectual abilities.
I think that balance and timing are the keys to healthy development. Provide the right kinds of experiences at the right time. For example, if you take a newborn and do not hold that infant and put her in a seventh grade classroom and leave her for the afternoon, it's not a good experience. It can actually be abusive. But, if you take the 14-year-old child and rather than having them spend the afternoon in school, you hold and rock them all afternoon, that is not the right experience at the right time for that child. When a six-month-old child is strapped into a chair in front of a videotape designed to teach them a different language, that is a different experience than an eight-year-old child listening to the same tape. The infant's experience would be totally inappropriate, but the eight-year-old's may be great. What's important is when experience is provided and how it's mixed in with other crucial experiences.
ECT: Your comments begin to address an issue that's important today. As we move into the 21st century with pressure to gain experiences in technology, specifically computers, would you address how parents and early childhood educators could specifically work together to create this balance for young children?
Dr. Perry: While technology can help us teach children, in the end our children learn from us. Parents and teachers must act as facilitators in children's learning. For example, sitting down together and using playing cards is a very cognitive experience. They can learn how to add, they can learn how to predict, they can laugh, and they can learn how to win. In their interaction with a parent they're using this externalized object which is a playing card and a game. A very similar thing can happen with emerging technologies. I believe parents and teachers can take advantage of the interactive qualities of a computer to enhance the experiences available to children.
As parents think about the future they need to realize two things: technology is not going to go away and we are in the midst of a major sociocultural quantum shift. These technologies are revolutionizing the world our children will live in. So our task is to balance appropriate skill-development with technologies with the core principles and experiences necessary to raise healthy children.
We must keep the core principles of healthy development in mind as we incorporate these technology and tools. If we do that we'll be fine. And at the heart of any healthy child is the opportunity for enriching and nurturing interactions with other human beings. I think the key to making technologies healthy is to make sure that we use them to enhance or even expand our social interactions and our view of the world as opposed to using them to isolate and create an artificial world.
Unfortunately, technology is often used to replace social situations and I would rather see it used to enhance human interactions. And I think that can happen.
ECT: Earlier you began to discuss some of the pitfalls that you see with respect to using technology with children. Do you have any other thoughts or anything you would specifically like to cover there?
Dr. Perry: One of the obvious issues that all parents and even the people that develop multimedia material struggle with is controlling access to content that may not be developmentally appropriate. There are going to be computer programs and sites on the Internet and television shows that have content that may be appropriate for an 18-year-old, but very inappropriate for a preschool child. It means that in an environment where there is not parental control or the possibility for supervision, a child may have access to content that has extreme violence or presents inappropriate or destructive concepts such as racism, misogyny, or age-inappropriate sexuality. In the end, as with all other tools, adults must protect children from misuse or inappropriate access.
As we begin to create more child-sensitive television, for example, we will have to recognize that young children will understand in different ways from adults. For example, a 4-year-old child seeing the Oklahoma bombing — or a plane crash coverage on the news multiple times may think that buildings are blowing up all over the place and many planes crashed — rather than understanding that these multiple stories are actually from single events. And so access to information that is developmentally appropriate is something that we need to be very concerned about.
ECT: Would you address how you see specific opportunities for the use of technology to support children, say with special needs, are at-risk or who need assistance with language development?
Dr. Perry: Yes, in fact we have seen the use of technology here work very well to help children. The use of specialized computer programs has really helped a lot of kids that we work with. Even on the simplest level, if a child has some sort of fine motor or large motor problem so that their handwriting is very immature and very slow and looks sloppy, their esteem about their work product or their homework is very low. So they may be very reluctant to work hard because they always get negative feedback. They hand in papers that are all messy. You put them on a word processor and they can hand in papers that are clean and neat and they can see how to spell words correctly. Just very simple, non-specialized, software can be very helpful if used in the right way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOhb4n4ADbM
In addition, there are a number of specialized programs that allow children with certain information-processing problems to get a multimedia presentation of content so that they can better understand and process the material. They are able to see the written words and see a visual image and hear the sounds — all at the same time. Combining these sensory-modalities helps a child to more efficiently internalize information about a topic. If they have, for example, an auditory processing difficulty or a reading disorder they may be very bright but they don't read very efficiently so if something is read to them on a CD-ROM with visual images they are better able to internalize the information. This helps these children feel better about themselves because they perform better. They're not as afraid of school anymore.
There are emerging technologies used in traditional video games (e.g., Sega, Nintendo) that our group is trying to get dedicated to alternative interactive games with more stimulating but non-violent themes. We are hoping to use a variety of game-like models to teach kids language, to teach children about self-esteem, to teach children about the impact of trauma and how it can be overcome, for example. I think that when these technologies are actually used for more than entertainment we're going to see tremendous positive benefits.
Even now there are a number of good software programs with a primary educational focus on mathematics or reading. These programs, which are very engaging, challenge children to read better and learn how to solve math problems. When information is presented in a fun and engaging way, it is a lot easier than looking at a single page that has a bunch of columns of numbers you're supposed to add up.
New UK Seatbelt Video
A wonderful video clip showing how important to have a seatbelt. Technology is amazing. Please enjoy!
dana
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