Why Little eLit?

Early Literacy and Electronic Literature for children

Why should we even consider eBooks for children? This is a hot topic right now, and while some forward-thinking and inherently awesome librarians (and other people) all all jiggy with eBooks for kids, others are not yet convinced. The plain and simple truth is that we live in a digital world, and if we want our kids to be successful in that world, they're going to have to be smart about technology. Let's give them good books, electronic AND tree-based, so that their little sponge brains can soak up all that good learnin.

Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop

Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop is a research lab that specializes in the use of emerging media to enhance literacy development in young children.  They produce media (this is Sesame of Sesame Street, after all), research,  conferences, and all sorts of other resources for educators, researchers and parents.  Check out their Initiatives page to see what they're up to and Reports for full-text research articles on children, learning and media.

App Review: Drawing Pad

We first encountered Drawing Pad (Amazon) at the Apple store.  We then went home and installed it on both the Kindle Fire and Galaxy Tab because it was such a hit with the little dude.

You can use digital crayons, pencil crayons, markers, stamps, coloured paper and stickers. The sticker function is by FAR the most awesome. There are stickers of fish, vehicles, insects, faces, flowers, birds and animals, all of which can be shrunk or enlarged and moved around until you "stamp" it to make it stick permanently. The drawer that holds all the tools opens and closes, and Little J can now navigate his way through the drawer to change colours or tools, as well as scrap his piece of artwork and start over again.

Drawing Pad (iTunes) is an awesome app for learning fine motor movement, playing with paint without making a mess, and making the train go choo choo down the track.  Totally worth the $1.99 and good for kids from 2 up.

App Review: First Words

Review submitted by the lovely Genesis.


Here's my tip for getting through a restaurant meal with a toddler: get the FirstWords apps from Learning Touch. We have both the Animals and the Vehicles apps ($1.99 each). They also offer a Deluxe edition for $4.99 that has animals, vehicles, colors, shapes, etc.

FirstWords shows a picture of an animal or vehicle, with letter tiles spelling out the name of the object. There are corresponding letter tiles scattered randomly below the image and the child has to move the letter tiles to their appropriate place by correctly matching tiles. Each time my son touches a letter tile, the app reads the letter. When he touches the picture, the app says the name of the object. Once he successfully puts all the letter tiles in their correct places, the app reads each letter, says the whole word, and the picture spins, enlarges and makes the appropriate animal or vehicle sound before moving to the next word. The voice of the male reader is clear and pleasant.

There are some settings you can adjust to make it a little easier or harder depending on your child's age and familiarity with the app. I love that there are visual cues for beginners who don't know their alphabet yet. They can randomly move tiles around, but when they get close to the matching tile, it lights up.

My son adores these apps and was very quickly able to use them without help from Mom. He learned his alphabet by playing these games, picked up some vocabulary and now he gets that letters combine to make words. It's really fun to see him take skills he's picked up using the iPhone and apply them to reading print books. He loves to spell out titles and words in his books, and it's very natural to him to move between print and electronic media.

FirstWords apps are currently available for iPhone and iPad, and I thought they were worth every penny. New animals and vehicles have been added at no extra charge with periodic updates of the app, which helps to keep the game interesting. For less than the price of a mocha at Starbucks my son has had hours of entertainment and education, and it's so nice when my husband and I can actually sit and enjoy a cup of coffee at the end of a meal instead of taking turns chasing our energetic boy around a restaurant. Also great for car trips, plane rides, doctor's waiting rooms, or anytime the parent in charge needs a little break.

Learning Touch also makes a First Letters and Phonics app. My son loves it, but to me the voice of the reader/singer for the app is only slightly less grating than nails on a chalkboard. Caveat emptor!

My heart's an iPod

We listen to a LOT of music in our house.  Little J is very fond of the Decemberists, Charlotte Diamond, Europe, Laurie Berkner, Tom Waits, and Gym Class Heroes.  He will ask to listen to them.

"We can have my heart a stereo?"
"Sure baby! How do you want to listen to my heart's a stereo?"
"On iPod! No, on pomputer.  Yes! pomputer!"

So we fire up the pomputer and find some quality YouTubeage for him to dance around the living room to.  At times he will ask to have music on the "eBook" (that's what he calls the Galaxy Tab), so we use the YouTube App to find music there.  My digital native knows there are different ways to access the same digital content, and depending on his mood, he can choose just audio or audio and video.  This too, ladies and gentlemen, is media literacy in action.

Libraries Get the Shaft in Otherwise Cool Book

I just started reading John Palfrey and Urs Gasser's Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (review to come).

It depresses me that I didn't have to read any further than page 2 to hear libraries being slammed:

[Digital natives] study, work, write and interact with each other in ways that are very different from the ways you did growing up.  They read blogs rather than newspapers. They often meet each other online before they meet in person. they probably don't even know what a library card looks like; and if they do, they've probably never used it.

DAMN!  OUCH!  BLARG!

That hits right where it hurts.  Granted, this book was written in 2008 (that's TOTALLY ancient), and I don't remember seeing either of the authors at CLA this year to see all the cool stuff lots of public libraries are doing for these digital natives.  We're working on it, guys!

I held regular teen craft nights in my branch where we made duct tape iPod protectors.  We're acquiring all sorts of eReaders in my current library to train the staff with so they know what to do when someone comes in and says "I can't get this eBook to work!" We're working on changing the minds of the more conservative librarians who think that all a library will ever need to provide for young people is books and storytimes.  We're facebooking, tweeting, blogging, chat referencing and tumblring.  We're LMFAOing.  We're pimping our iPhones right along with our bookcarts.

But we can't compete with Amazon, iTunes, Google, B&N, The Pirate Bay or all sorts of other providers of digital entertainment when it comes to ease and convenience.  Not yet.  We need some of those digital natives to infiltrate the publishers to make it a little easier to lend digital content.

UPDATE:

Page 8 says this:

Librarians, too, are reimagining their role: Instead of primarily organizing book titles in musty card catalogs and shelving the books in the stacks, they serve as guides to an increasingly variegated information environment.

Ok, they get points for the "increasingly variegated information environment" bit, but these dudes must be old.  Card catalogues?  Librarians shelving books? That's just crazy talk.

eArticle review: Digital literacy crucial early in life, educators say

Faith Rogow, the founding president of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, which we looked at a little here made a presentation recently at an Early Childhood Education conference put on by the Pittsburg Association for the Education of Young Children.  The Tribune Review wrote a nice little article about it here.

In this new world, "what does it mean to be literate?" Rogow asked the 200 teachers attending the daylong symposium on Friday. 

Reading and writing are part of the answer, she said. But so is the ability to navigate the new media landscape. For early education teachers, it means preparing youngsters "for the world they actually live in," Rogow said -- the world of interactive, instant communication and information-gathering.

This conference was aimed at early childhood educators, but many of the programs were presented by librarians.  Check out the conference brochure.  I wish I could have been there!  I am contacting a few of the presenters to pick their brains and find out when they will next be speaking somewhere on my side of the continent. 


Programs I would have loved to have sat in on:
There's an App for That: Selecting Quality Children's Books in E-book Format by Tess Reismeyer
The Library Online Playground by Caralee Sommerer & Megan Fogt
Using Media & Technology Tools in the Early Childhood Classroom by Michael Robb

eBook Vocabulary: Media Literacy

Well, whaddya know!  There is an entire professional organization dedicated to Media Literacy.  The National Association for Media Literacy Education publishes the Journal of Media Literacy Education and provides us with a handy dandy definition.


"Media literacy [consists] of a series of communication competencies, including the ability to ACCESS, ANALYZE, EVALUATE, and COMMUNICATE information in a variety of forms, including print and non-print messages."


Whoa.  Ok.  That's very broad.  Luckily they break down the definition further:

• Media refers to all electronic or digital means and print or artistic visuals used to transmit messages.
• Literacy is the ability to encode and decode symbols and to synthesize and analyze messages.
• Media literacy is the ability to encode and decode the symbols transmitted via media and the ability to synthesize, analyze and produce mediated messages.
• Media education is the study of media, including ‘hands on’ experiences and media production.
• Media literacy education is the educational field dedicated to teaching the skills associated with media literacy.

But- it's not really literacy, is it?

Yes!  It is!  Media literacy comprises much more than the linear orthographical decoding of yesteryear.  Our kids are digital natives who need to know how to comprehend and utilize multi-sensory information from all different types of devices.  Words, images and sound are all legitimate purveyors of information requiring different skills for processing.


In order for kids to become useful people in our increasingly digital world, they're going to have to be proficient not only in using current technology, but in figuring out new technology as it becomes available.  Traditional literacy was basically a skill that you learned once and you were set for life; media literacy is a wider set of continually evolving, increasingly sophisticated skills.


So how does this relate to eBooks?  
Reading eBooks together is an awesome way to give our little monsters the skills to figure out what they're going to need to know in our big bad world of sensory overload.  If we can give them good quality eLiterature with well designed multimedia extras we start them on the path to media literacy.