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Highly successful, innovative small charter schools such as High Tech High, Apple Tree and KIPP Academies have proven that kids can learn essential literacy skills starting in early childhood with a personalized curriculum, integrated technology, and skillful teachers. Each state should establish at least one digital partnership Pre-K through third grade school as a model demonstration site. These schools should be laboratories for testing many different digital approaches to learning and assessment, as well as for testing different ways to break down the barriers in and out-of-school learning. They could become a hub for the professional development of digitally savvy teachers.

Pasnik says she sees a lot of learning potential in these newer technologies. Tablet computers for example, offer repetition, portability and the possibility of learning with gestural movements, all of which hold promise for preschool students. She cautions that many of the apps being developed today place too much emphasis on academic skills and not enough emphasis on making things, discovering, sharing and turn taking. “We do a disservice to young children in attending to a very rigid and narrow sense of math and literacy and not really paying attention to the developmental needs of this age group,” said Pasnik. “The uptake of adoption here is far in advance of the research. But that’s not to say that we can’t be really thoughtful about what we do know about children’s development.”