Chapter 5 of the online book Young Children, New Media, and Libraries: A Guide for Incorporating New Media into Library Collections, Services, and Programs for Families and Children Ages 0-
http://littleelit.com/book/
This paper, Investigating Analytic Tools for e-Book Design in Early Literacy Learning (available as PDF download) speaks to the importance of good design elements, for e-books to realize their potential to benefit children. Appreciated the list of design principles in Appendix A/considerations for evaluating design elements.
A great way for a child to be engaged and excited about writing. Students' books can be shared on classroom blogs, websites or the hyperlink can be emailed to parents.
From the menu, if you click on eBooks and select Quality Rating, you can access the Akron Ready Steps e-Book Quality Rating Tool- 2010-2011, with opportunities to rate various items in areas such as Ease of Use, Multimedia, Interaction. Very interesting!
Jooners is a free Web site focused on communication and collaboration between schools
and parents. Its e-mail and scheduling Web site allows parents to have immediate online
access to school-wide information, such as calendars, events, after-school programs and
field trip information. Parents and teachers can arrange sign-up lists for any event that
needs parental support, such as book fairs or PTA fundraisers, and coordinate classroom
volunteers.
Tikatok is a website where you can create your own book using your own pictures scanned into the computer. You can order a copy of your completed book so that you can have a hard copy of what you or your children have created. This is a great tool for teachers or parents to inspire a child's imagination to create a story with both words and pictures.
I really like this site and would definitely use it if I had children. It makes it so easy to make a story and actually get a hard copy of it. I reviewed Storybird, which is another site that allows you to create stories, but it doesn't have the option of ordering it. I think this is a step up from Storybird!
A friend of mine's three-year-old son can turn on a computer, direct the internet browser to YouTube and search for funny video clips. When I learned this I thought, "there's no way." But it's amazing what kids are capable of. These so-called digital natives never knew of a world without computers, cell phones, or the internet. I read about a couple who develop iPhone games for kids, and use their three-year-old as the guinea pig. Parents often rely on their kids to show them how this stuff works, leaving them wondering how they're supposed to, well, be the parents here.
We wanted to find out how parents can encourage their kids' use of technology without losing control. So we called up two experts in the field. First, Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children's Technology Review, and author of a recent study on young children's tech habits, and Lisa Guernsey, senior policy analyst at New America Foundation, and author of the 2007 book Into the Minds of Babes.