UWW310 Technology & Early Childhood

Technology is here to stay. Our toddlers swipe as easily as they turn a page in a book. They can find their favorite videos on any screen device and FaceTime with grandparents pretty much on demand. Yes, the American Academy of Pediatrics did once recommend no screen time for children under 2 years old in their position statement on Media and Children.

Help parents, educators, and others understand what really boosts social and emotional learning

This web page has information to support preschool teachers

Co-authored by Lakshmi, a Mobicip blogger who is just as passionately opinionated about the juxtaposition of technology, parenting and education. It may not take a village to raise a child anymore, but parents and teachers certainly continue to play a vital role in the growth of the child.

A free community for sharing instructional videos and content for teachers and students. We are an education focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners.

Resources to Equip and Encourage Joyful Learning Experiences

Award-winning reading solution with thousands of leveled readers, lesson plans, worksheets and assessments to teach guided reading, reading proficiency and comprehension to K-5 students

Mathletics is engaging, supportive & designed for the USA: targeted to state-based standards including the Common Core, TEKS and MAFS. It switches kids onto math!

Although this site contains ads and games that are just for fun, it also contains a lot of educational games. There are math, language arts, history, geography, and science games. Students really enjoy these games as they are engaging and fun. There is an option to remove ads, but you have to pay a fee to do so. I think as long as you're monitoring students' online activity, there is no need to pay extra to remove the ads.

Mrs. Riley is a site for professionals, teachers, and parents to collaboratively make educational materials. Mrs. Riley's PageBuilder makes it easy to create custom picture cards and share them with others. This is great to use with students who are unable to communicate effectively. By using picture cards either as a communication board or strategically placing them around the classroom, can help both the student and teacher tremendously.

Headsprout is a kids reading program that uses effective, interactive online episodes to teach K-5 students the reading fundamentals and comprehension skills they need to become successful readers. It adapts to meet the needs of every unique learner. It keeps students engaged and provides teachers with automated reports that track student progress. This site is a great supplement for classroom instruction.

This is a great online math software for elementary and middle school students. It is unlike other educational sites because it doesn't have pop ups or "just for fun" games. It also adapts to the individual student, personalizes instruction, develops skills and closes gaps fast, and integrates assessment with instruction. All the while keeping kids engaged and having fun.

This article was great for offering suggestions on handling the tricky subject of racism and discrimination. Discrimination happens everyday in classrooms. As a parent, I would never want my child to be put in a situation where she was uncomfortable whether it was because someone picked on her for being half african american or because she was a girl. Children should learn to understand that we are all different but deserve to be treated the same. I will be sharing this with my teachers to get some ideas!

The clip about schools killing creativity really resonated with me. About 9 minutes into the video, he says that schools starts to focus on educating children from the waist up. What he means is that schools are so focused on the core subjects (math, english, etc) that they are forgetting how important the Arts are and what kind of impact not teaching children these subjects can do. He also stated that we do not grow to be artists, we are born artists and we grow out of being artists when we don't utilize our artistic side. This video along with most of the TED talks videos I have seen have really made me think about the way that children are learning and what we can do to help them be the best they can.

While this video does not directly like to Early Childhood Education, I found it to ultimately begin in childhood. They followed, interviewed and surveyed hundreds of men from different backgrounds over 75 years. They found that men who were had strong relationships and were not lonely were more happy AND healthy when they were older. For me, this boiled down to sharing this video with other explaining how important it is to create strong, healthy and positive relationship with you children so that they can continue it into adulthood.

More Than Words is a non profit used book store located in Waltham and in Boston. You can donate used books to the store or go into the stores and buy books! This company hires and encourages young teens in the foster care system or in the care of the state get and maintain jobs. All of the proceeds from the books go toward these young individuals as they are teaching them how to run a business! I have not only bought books for the children I care for, but for myself as well!

Although this is more of a company use, this is great. It is an on-line assessment tool where you can write observations, add photos, create conferences forms, get activity ideas and even invite parent to join and use the site to see how their child is progressing.

We use this site for at my center and I personally love it. We are able to do weekly observations, assessments and curriculum right on this site. It also has an good section that allows you to look up activities in the different areas of development.

Reddit is where people go to share. It has a bunch of groups called subreddits that are used to organize the material. If you add "r/education/" or "r/ECEProfessionals/" to the end of the Reddit link, you will find it to be similar to this: sharing links to relevant education topics.