I feel incredibly lucky to be in this room with so much really awesome and rambunctious conversation going on. So thank you all so much. It's what's making this event successful. I'm really excited to hear so many of the interchanges in conversations that are going on already. So we're going to come back together again. We're going to have our second panel discussion and this one will be focused on policy and I'm really looking forward to this for a lot of reasons. One is that as I started moving into the world of policy and yet still being participating in a lot of conversations about media and kids, I felt like we never quite got to the actual like big questions like wait what needs to change in the way we conceive our schools and the way we understand early learning centers and the way we think about preparing our teachers. What needs to change to get us to a new plane, a new plane of understanding of using media with kids in developmentally informed ways and creative ways. So this is exciting to have this moment and what we're going to do is and my kind of not so hidden agenda here is to have you all take a minute to hear some ideas we've been putting together at the New America Foundation and so we're going to take a few minutes where I'll just describe some of those and then we'll have our next panel of experts come up and Sarah Mead will be moderating. I'll introduce her formally at that time. But let me take a minute to ask if and I hope you all have it. As you walked in today if you had a chance to pick up this paper and there are copies of it outside if you haven't grabbed it yet envisioning a digital age architecture for early education this I hope is going to prime the pump for some new conversations about how to think about early education policy in a digital age, how to be better prepared for what's coming for our teachers and our kids and I really do hope it might be just the beginning. There's a reason that this particular paper and report and these slides I'm going to show you they don't have policy prescriptions in them and that's because we really feel like we're at the beginning of this conversation and there's so many experts and practitioners who need to be in the conversation to really understand what we should do next. But what we wanted to do was to start kind of laying the cornerstones of a new way of thinking about early education or think about this in terms of some new blueprints we could work from. I just had a lot of architectural analogies in my head as I was working on this paper so you'll see some of that laced through and I want to say thanks to three foundations that have made the work on this paper possible just in that they've been very generous in enabling us at the early education initiative to have some time to think about where technology fits and that's the foundation for child development, the Grable Foundation and the Pritzker Children's Initiative. So I just wanted to say thanks to those philanthropies. So the title again is envisioning a digital age architecture for early education and the idea is that just as buildings change with the arrival of new technologies, just as when we had plate glass or indoor plumbing or electric lighting we started changing the structure of our buildings and the same should be and really is already happening in early education. And again we're thinking early education here as birth through the third grade. There's already a lot of change afoot in this area. So for those of you who are not following every single move that's going on in the early childhood policy world, there's a lot going on right now. The administration is very interested in and wants to promote better learning environments for more and more children. But we are also learning from developmental science that there's a lot, the children have a capacity to learn a lot when they're put in the right environments and that's led to a lot of higher expectations for children and a lot of higher expectations for educators and caregivers and there are many reforms underway to try to help meet those expectations. And I put together some of these ideas very much to think of them as embedded in that larger reform conversation that's already going on. So as you hear me talk about some of this, it's really not as something to do separately from reforms that are already underway but as something to think about injecting into the reform conversation at various points. So let me also raise what I'm sure is on the minds particularly of those of you who might run early childhood programs or those of you who are really dependent on funding streams and that is that we cannot forget that early childhood programs particularly those that are aimed at children under age five are underfunded and it is hard sometimes to talk about where technology fits in an environment where many of these programs are already just barely keeping it together to be able to keep the salaries that they want to keep to keep the teachers that they want to keep to maintain and even elevate teaching practice. All of those are expensive things and we're working in an environment of resource scarcity. And so I do understand how it can be really tempting then to just avoid talking about technology in this context, right? I mean it's hard to imagine how we possibly would have room for this on top of everything else that's being asked of the early childhood environment. But I think that to ignore this would be a mistake. And I say that because there are a host of issues that might be able to be tackled by some of the technologies that are available to us if we're using them in smart ways. Addressing concerns of inequality and digital divides is obviously one. But there's also a chance now for educators and policymakers to bend the technology marketplace towards them, right? Towards us to help those who out there developing things to recognize what teachers really need and what parents really need based on science. There's a huge opportunity now for enabling new connections to resources so that teachers have that ability, new materials for use in their classrooms, new tools of communication, new partnerships for cost savings and not to mention collaboration and creativity by children as well as by educators and parents. And the states and communities create new systems, as many of them are already trying this, right? They're really trying to create connections between what for a very long time have been very siloed between the Head Start community or child care providers or state funded pre-K or what's happening in elementary schools and there's a really I think exciting effort underway to make a lot of connections between these but are we using technology to its fullest extent in making those connections possible. So we have laid out here five actions that we think should be taken and with an under each action are a lot of questions and I just want to take you through briefly what those are and then I will turn it over to Sarah and we'll start our panel. So one of the first ones that we think needs to be foremost in policymakers minds is to aim high and this is and we explain it in the report in more depth but it's really the idea that we know a lot now about how important the interaction is between the caregiver and parent and a child and that those can't be just kind of wrote like one off conversations. This can't just be about like putting out construction paper and some paste and like figuring that kids are going to learn you know what they need to learn. We need to be thinking about quality all the time we're thinking about the experiences kids have and let's make sure that we are using that same quality lens when we are imagining how technology might be used with kids. There's a lot of other ways that we can certainly aim high in terms of our our standards for the way we use technology and we lay out a few of those ideas in the report. We also think that there needs to be a huge effort on boosting the workforce to make it possible to use new technologies in ways that spark children's creativity enable them to see themselves as analysts to see themselves as creators as artists and that's going to happen when we have a workforce and this is absolutely needed in the in the grades you know under kindergarten but I don't think we should forget about what's happening in K3 and how squeezed the teachers in our elementary schools might feel and how maybe a little support they've received in their education schools to be able to do what we need to do to bring kids those rich learning opportunities. So we talk about there's been some reports on this already. One take a giant step was put out by the Joan Gantz CUNY Center a couple of years ago and we we borrow liberally from some of those ideas but but also from from several others that have come come along as we're thinking about education school reform generally and teacher preparation reform as well. Tapping hidden assets is of a third action that I want to explain a little bit for you because it might not be obvious at first and that is the idea that we right now in part because of silos we aren't taking full advantage of resources that already exist and many of them are paid for by our our you know taxpayer dollars and yet we're not connecting them to teachers and to early learning centers. We're not enabling public schools to fully take advantage of them and they are things like what's happening in our public libraries and the kind of store of resources that are now available in public libraries including ebooks and in all sorts of online materials that could be of use to both teachers and children. Another hidden asset that we see out there is what our our public media has made available over the years what been put out on public TV through PBS or through other outlets and and how can we use some of those assets and repurpose them for use in in classrooms or enable them to be part of teacher preparation programs in new ways. And the last one under hidden assets is thinking about the developers of media for kids. A lot of them are not connected in any way to the education community are not really connected in any deep way to the child development research community and and that is leading to the creation of apps out there that may just really not make sense in the context of children's lives. I mean they might sound good at first like oh yay ABCs I can do kind of flashcards with my kids but is that really is that really reflecting what we're learning from research that children need. So how can we tap into I think a very enthusiastic developer community to try to orient what they're producing in a way that's useful to kids and really kind of helping them learn and thrive. Another one is to connect information I'm sorry to do a better job of connecting to information and to each other. And in this section of the paper we are focusing in on the need to understand internet connectivity broadband access not only in what's always kind of traditionally called kind of K-12 but also to recognize the needs in our early learning centers and to quite frankly recognize that even in our quote K-12 and I want to say really it's pre K-12 environments we do not have the access that we might we as adults sitting in our offices with always on access that kind of access is not always available in those classrooms in the way we think it might be and it might be strange to imagine that a classroom full of three-year-olds needs internet access but what about that teacher who wants to be able to connect to or show a video for 30 seconds that is going to lead kids into some sort of cool adventure they're going to do on the playground. How are we enabling teachers to kind of be flexible with their practice and how can we use internet access to do that. There's a lot more in that section I want to give a quick nod to Lindsay Tepe who is a colleague of mine at New America who has been doing a lot of research on that front so thank you Lindsay. And then lastly we see a real need to do more investigation and ultimately this means more research but it means research that can be really applied to what's happening in classrooms and research that is as much as possible devoid of vested interests and those vested interests can come in the form of philanthropies quite honestly right and certainly they can come in the form of corporations they can also come in the form of the researchers themselves and their own kind of biases that they bring to it so how do we using policy create a a vast array of new research and experiments longitudinal studies surveys that can ensure that we're seeing a full range and a diversity of of information on what's working with young children and what's not or what's working as we try to help teachers and what's not. So those are the five pieces of this new digital age architecture that we're imagining here and I am now going to turn over the discussion to Sarah Mead and I just want to say a big thank you to Sarah. Sarah is senior associate partner at Bellwether education partners which is a firm here in DC that does a wide array of research and analysis on a host of issues from the earliest years all the way up through higher education and and as many of you may know also Sarah is in addition to being a good friend of mine she she's the one who brought me to numerica many many years ago so I before we were good friends and so I wanted to thank her for for being here so please join me in welcoming Sarah. So we have you know earlier in in the afternoon we talked about sort of research and practice and now we're going to transition into talking about some of the policy implications of all these developments we've been looking at related to young children and technology and some of the tensions and questions that we were talking about earlier and to do that we are fortunate to have a really great and diverse panel here with us. Anne Hansen is the senior research and policy senior manager of research and policy initiatives at the ounce of prevention fund in that role she advances the organization's national efforts to scale innovative early education programs and policies that serve at risk young children and families. In part of that work includes directing the ounces digital learning initiative which explores the potential of digital media and technology to promote effective early education practice and family engagement and we'll hear a little bit more about what that initiative actually does a little bit later. We also have Chip Donahue who is the dean of distance learning and continuing education at the Ericsson Institute where he's leading the development of online masters credential and continuing education programs for early childhood educators as well as directing the technology and early childhood center at Ericsson. In addition to his work at Ericsson Dr. Donahue is a senior fellow at the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning in the Children's Media where he co-chaired the group that revised the 2012 NACI joint position statement on technology and interactive media as tools in early childhood programs. We also have Michelle Figgler who is the executive director of the Pittsburgh Alliance for the Education Young Children a affiliate of the National Association for the Education of Young Children serving a 10 county region in southwestern Pennsylvania and we have Lori Romero who coordinates and supervises the child and family library services department for the Arapaho Library District located in the south suburban area of Denver Colorado where her primary focus is meeting the needs of families of children ages zero to three and their parents and supporting their development and education. So before we get into talking about some of the specific questions and some of the specific work that you do I would just love to hear if anybody has any immediate gut reactions to the earlier conversation that we had or to the video or to Lisa's presentation and recommendations with a specific view towards either policy or your work in specific implications you'd like to draw out on this panel. Sure I do. It's a big surprise. Boost the workforce and connect where two have heard things and that's absolutely right what we're talking about so that's critical. I also want to call for a common definition of screen time in the digital age and we need to rally the AAP caring for our children, Eckers, state licensing organizations, accreditation, teacher preparation programs. We're all talking about it in a different way and everywhere we're talking about it is out of date so I think that's a really critical policy opportunity for us here. I would say tap the hidden assets. I have to be the library advocate. It really is just these resources are pretty abundant in libraries in terms of staff that are chomping at the bit to support parents. Staff that are already working with parents and their kids together and I'll talk more about that in a minute but the resources like online ebooks and online resources as well we're really ready for common conversations and collaborations so I'm excited about that. I think it's important for us to remember just the underfunding of the field in general so when you spoke of that how do we remember even with all the progress that that we're making the strain on the workforce the strain on the early care and education field and as we have all these opportunities because folks are talking about it now more than ever how do we make sure that people understand the reality of what the field is today so I think that's critically important. I would just add first off I think all of the questions raised in the brief I love how specific they were they really resonate with what we're seeing in Chicago Chip and I are colleagues in Chicago in Illinois and in states across the country and as I was trying to think about sort of the common thread across those one thing that struck me is as we think about early childhood policy as is in current state we don't actually really address technology like at all and that's for better or for worse and when we do it's to Chip's point in this sort of very narrow frame of we're going to try and assign limits we're going to prevent harm and so I think what this brief helps us do in this conversation is helping us do is try to shift that frame from this prevention mode where we're limiting and discouraging the use of digital media technology to one where we're allowing for that creative use that we know is out there and where we're enabling and maybe even promoting effective and developmentally appropriate use and I think that's a big shift and it's going to take us a while we have members in our own community that we need to bring along with us but I think that's really where we need to go and so I really appreciated all the questions that were posed in the brief to help raise those in our local context so there's a lot of rich stuff in those reactions that I want to get back to in a moment but I wanted to segue you know using your great point about the conversation about early childhood education frequently not talking about technology to just ask you know why does the conversation need to include attention to technology why are organizations like the ounce engaging on technology which I think probably surprises a lot of people to learn that that's an initiative that you have and and then if you could tell us a little bit more about specifically what you're doing there I think that would be helpful as well yeah well for those of you who don't know the ounce prevention fund is based in Chicago Illinois but we're actually a national organization committed to I think our mission is oh Tony's gonna kill me our mission is to ensure that young children at risk achieve their full potential and we focus on children and their families from birth to five years old in low-income communities and we have four three core areas of work research practice and policy and across each of those domains what we're really looking for is what are the highest quality learning experiences we can provide for young children whether that's at home or in an early learning setting and so for any early childhood organization that is interested in ensuring those high quality experiences you need to be concerned about technology and how it's used because we want it we don't want it to be used poorly and we want it to be used well if it is and so to the extent that evidence from practice and evidence from research tells us that these new exciting tools can either inhibit or enhance quality experiences or inhibit and enhance outcomes for children and families we need to have an informed opinion and perspective on that and that perspective in turn needs to inform sort of the policies that we're talking about today and that's going to take a while and it has to be a thoughtful conversation obviously but I think there's also an urgency to these questions and I think Lisa does a great job of raising this early on in the brief that technology is here it's already in our homes teachers are already using it in classrooms and parents and teachers are like are really eager for information if you provide teachers and parents with information they will use it they will apply it we know this from our from our work on on the ground and so we need to respond to that demand and so we really just owe it to ourselves to our field and to the children and families we're serving to have a really informed perspective on this and ensure that the policies we're all talking about really are ensuring those high quality experiences for kids and I just want to just get back to this issue about policy you know not we could talk a lot about a lot of different kinds of policies and we will as we go through this conversation but my guess is that there are some areas where policy overlaps with technology and early childhood right now that are not well understood by the field you know for example you mentioned a variety of ways in which policy intersects with screen time and we'd love to just unpack a little bit more what are some of those specific ways that it comes up where are some of the biggest areas where perceptions or misperceptions about technology get reflected in early childhood policies and where is that creating you know potentially barriers for doing what's right for kids let me jump in I used to lovingly refer to our early childhood colleagues as low tech high touch because we really didn't want to deal with technology we wanted to do this we wanted to come together we're not going to do a webinar we're going to come together we're not we're going to take a continuing education course in the room at the same time a lot of that's changed and it's changed because we're all carrying one of these and so if you have a room full of early childhood people and they say I don't do tech and you say how many of you have a smartphone and they all raise their hand you actually can call the question around how you know how non-technological are you so I think that that's one technology when it has been in an early childhood program has been in the office it's been a tool for administration it's often been a computer that was donated by parents when it was already obsolete and it's still on the desk of the administrator many years later so you know we struggle to stay up I'm very excited about this particular device but this isn't what's in early childhood programs most early childhood programs it's locked down desktop computer that was also donated by parents years ago so I think we have to look at the realities of what we're excited about and where it's going but also what's really out there in the field I'll just add that I think that the policies especially as we're embarking on some real investments around pre-k education both on the federal level and in many states really have to be able to dig deeper to see are the standards aligned in the way that we really talk about all the time so we talk about how we want quality early childhood programming for children so they can be ready for school but we're not digging down to see is that policy is there even a policy on technology or I would say digital media learning we really have to have a new new definition that we're actually setting our children up to not be prepared to do the math game that your daughter and my son now does in second grade so we're not aligning curriculum anywhere so the question to me is so when you walk into a early childhood classroom people ask why is there a computer in there you walk into a second grade classroom you ask why isn't there a computer in there we have to fix that and that in that policy really needs to look at that and so you raise really the issue of standards here and there are two really critical sets of standards that we think about in early childhood education one being you know early learning standards or standards for what what children should learn and know and be able to do and then the second being quality standards at a program level in terms of you know both both inputs but also what should we actually see and what should be happening and it's probably a third set around around educators but i want to hold off on that for a moment because it's such a rich topic um but let's talk about what's the current state of our standards both for children and for programs regarding technology and you know where do we need to take another look at what those state standards look like potentially in either of those areas so we've had a great opportunity in uh pennsylvania and barb mitsenbergs here the deputy secretary of the office of child development and early learning so through a grant from from the grable foundation we've actually been able to push the envelope a bit so in pennsylvania like many states we use the environmental rating scale when we go in to look at a setting and there's a suite of those of those tools and uh folks were getting stuck on the screen time criteria and how the the the limit on screen time and what is screen time and what does that mean and how does what's happening with message from me which is happening in classrooms in Pittsburgh when the assessor would walk in and say well is that screen time or isn't that screen time that doesn't seem very much like screen time because children are interacting but there is a screen so we've actually been able to with with the support of octel kind of uh turn everything upside down and have assessors look at digital media literacy differently we're also at an advantage right because we have the fred rogers center in our backyard we have the fred rogers company i mean we have this right here however we've had leadership that has said how do we look at this differently um barb and her team has also been able to have now regular conversations with dick clifford and his team about how do we think differently about the ers how can we think differently about what is developmentally appropriate so um and and i think those conversations just have to continue to to to happen but it takes all of us sort of pushing the envelope a bit and um i think i i think the other thing so that's kind of a big one i think there's a very easy one that uh we have sort of taken on as a local a yc and it goes back to what someone said about the professional or how we perceive the person working in the field we've actually challenged programs to look at their cell phone policies i know that seems really silly doesn't it but it's a very easy policy that can be changed tomorrow doesn't take octel or or legislation we come from this this lens that oh if an early childhood teacher has her phone out then she must not be working now can you imagine that because you are all you're on your phone you're tweeting you're texting right right i see i see lots of phones we have to change that because and those are easy policies so i we've been trying to chip away at easy things for programs you can change that policy tomorrow and treat that professional like a professional instead of saying no cell phone because you're cutting off opportunity i think that's a really great perspective about these sort of simple incremental but powerful policy changes you can make it a local level because i think the really daunting thing here is that in early childhood we serve many masters right so um we most high quality programs are braiding a variety of public funding streams whether that's head start or child care or the state pre-k dollars and although i think race to the top and the new movement around qis in states are really pushing those systems to unify and align their standards those things in illinois are separate on their views on technology and so there really needs to be an alignment conversation in districts and in states about how do we ensure that so my child care licensing says i can only have 30 minutes a week but let's move says this but in the early learning standards it says i should integrate technology and by science curriculum so how do you how do we help support local programs in understanding and aligning all those things to really ensure that they can use the tools they want to when they want to promote learning i think that's a much more daunting but important conversation that needs to happen locally and i would just have to say that policy to validate informal learning um environments like the library are really important and now obviously the cost-cutting thing about across all those standards and in most states now is the the early learning and development standards for children or you know with if you're talking about head start the head start framework and i guess i'm curious you know one to what extent do people see those as reflecting or not reflecting or ignoring technology as part of children's development but then if we wanted to talk about how could we enhance the role of technology and that do we actually have a consensus on what young children should know and be able to do when it comes to technology and do we have the research base to get there don't think there's a consensus and there's so much i think one of the challenges of early learning standards is just last week i was looking at pennsylvania standards actually which are great on technology and really emphasize integrating it but also have learning standards about technology in daily lives and how it's important and they do want children correct me if i'm wrong to be able to know what they're for and how you use them whereas in illinois a chip and i you know i think it was last spring we're going through a revision process on our illinois early learning standards and i did a search and i think the word technology in like an 85 page document came up twice and so there's just great disparity across states about how they've approached it it really depends on those local partners who are advocating for their state policymakers or their those early learning councils or other tables where these decisions are being made there needs to be advocacy there to ensure that technology is addressed if that's the local demand and i think because of what illa said because technology is so rapid the early learning standards can't be created then put on a shelf so and unfortunately that's what happens a lot of time so how do you bring them out and say okay so what technologies do we have that can actually overlay this and how do we think about this differently or or in a new way so i think that that is also critically important because the standards have to keep up with what technology is doing as well i also think that there has to be um a lot more research on how children learn but sort of what are the precursor so i think that you know sua brenda camp's here and i remember the first time i saw a heads up reading right so when i was a much younger teacher but not but not very young and you actually then broke down for us how we teach reading to young children so i think about this a lot that we need that same research when it comes to technology because of my second graders being asked to to complete first in math on his computer but he doesn't have the skills he needs to get there and especially when we think about families who don't have opportunity we have to get down to breaking that down in the same way we did around reading i think they think the opportunities there and that would really help us give really um it would help early childhood teachers i think and let's talk to talking about teachers then um you know i think the issue of do teachers have the skills in technology has come up a number of times and the need to really think about the human capital piece of this um with love ship to hear you talk a little bit about what some of the implications are for early childhood educator preparation and sort of pre-service or or in service since many people do it in service programs for teachers um yeah so if we want to look for the problem in teacher preparation it is the teacher preparers of which i am one right so i'm calling myself and my colleagues out we are not digitally media literate we are not preparing teachers who are going to graduate this may from institutions all across this country to know how to use these tools wisely we've got a problem at the top and and that's a that's a big issue when i think of technology and teacher preparation though there are multiple layers to this so it's technology as a tool for preparing teachers online learning and other strategies that we're using that i use every day right to reach teachers and and prepare them it's technology that teachers use for their teaching and in their teaching um that with assessment and documentation and other strategies and then it's ultimately the technology we all want to spend our time talking about which is technology with young children in classrooms um but i think we need to look at at all of those um if we have teacher educators and this is not just higher ed now right it's professional development providers um it's trainers of early childhood folks it's administrators of programs who train their own staff i mean we got lots of layers to this um i i go back to what Eli said about how fast it's going that's either a problem or an opportunity i choose to see it as an opportunity i say every time to early childhood people none of us know what this is all about isn't that great let's figure it out together let's go together we don't really know but we know that they're already there it's already happening so i think that's that's a big deal we have take a giant step which which um lisa talked about we have the n a y c and fred roger center joint position statement we have some guidance here um but i i really do believe one of our challenges is in the preparation of teachers we did a study at the tech center um recently where we looked at stay with me on this one we did a sort of early childhood teacher education programs in the united states higher ed who issued degrees who taught online as well because we made an assumption that if they're already online means they've already made friends with technology they're probably most likely maybe it's a false assumption there's very little going on folks if there's anything at all it's a course it's not integrated and yet we want teachers to come out of their teacher preparation ready to integrate but we don't integrate ourselves if it's any topic it's about how they use technology for teaching tools so learning to be more effective as a teacher but not again digital media literacy with young kids so i i think we really we've got to look at the policy implications of our teacher preparation programs being way behind the curve on this one and lots of teacher educators i know have hair color that's very similar to mine and are saying that's for the younger faculty no it can't be for the younger faculty it's for all faculty we have to take this on and get on with it just in the same way that we're asking early childhood educators to take it on and get on with it what also just strikes me as a huge barrier for the field what you're saying about how few programs are using technology in the sense that as we talk about how we can help people who may be non-traditional learners who are already working as early childhood educators to raise their level of skills and credentials many of those people are in places where they may not have rural areas so forth where they may not have access to traditional in-person higher education and and we may be missing out on a big opportunity there yeah so there's there's a our mantra at the tech center is you got to use technology to figure out how to use technology you got to use technology to know why you want to use technology you just got to do it right we have a really fun blended learning project going on with the office of catholic schools in Chicago right now around these issues and around connected learning that has face-to-face components and has webinar live you know in time as an online community of practice has people practicing being in the community of practice practicing what it means to be a peer-to-peer learner practicing what it means to share resources with others we're just playing with it but that's the that's the point and that's really the level that we're at so we can actually learn about how to teach with technology by using technology and thinking about it Michelle I wanted to see if you wanted to elaborate on this from a professional development perspective since i know that's that's part of what you do absolutely so i think i'll stick with it with the access for for a moment i think it's also critical that we have policy that allow early childhood settings to have access so whether it's through e-rate or other or other mechanisms because programs are shut out of access when we tried message for me in the beginning remember elah that was one of our biggest challenge was how do we get access how do we get that ongoing internet access we didn't we realized it was going to be an issue we just didn't realize how big of an issue it was and this was both in urban and rural settings so i think we have to figure out policies around that and i think we also just have to to to address that folks are going to need these tools so once again we we have a great opportunity in our professional development with with octel and uh and uh philanthropy to actually get these tools into classrooms then you have to couple that with with professional development the message for me project sometimes we forget its technology that's what makes it so good because what's wrapped around the message for me project is lots of professional development on how this meets early learning standards the number one goal of message for me is to increase communication between parent and child and teacher that's the number one goal when somebody talks about technology i forget that there's technology involved so it has become a tool i think we also have to really think about um professional development in non-traditional ways so these are new conversations that i don't know a lot about but um badging i know that's a conversation we are having in in uh in uh Pittsburgh and i think that it could really help the early childhood community get credit for things that they're doing every day i also think we need to have policies that allow early childhood professionals especially family child care providers i'll i'll call that that very special group that are very dear to me that when they attend a children's museum or they attend a library that that counts for professional development hours we have to be able to figure that out we cannot have either local or state policies that put up a wall that say because the librarian doesn't have an early childhood certificate she's not teaching that provider something we have got to to um examine that and finally i'll say we we have to figure out a way to get our early childhood professionals out of their setting and visiting something else what's the chances of an early childhood person and someone that invents robots getting together just because it was an intentional meeting i had to get out of my comfort zone someone had to help me make that happen we have to get our our our early childhood professionals to be in other spaces and share their expertise it's reciprocal and share their expertise so i think that's a great transition to a question i wanted to ask lori um before that i just wanted to say i'm so glad you mentioned badges because uh kevin carrey who uh directs the education program at new america now and i wrote a paper calling for using the post-secondary badge system or to get access for early childhood credentials so i'm glad you brought that up um lori sort of you mentioned earlier libraries as this undertapped and underappreciated act asset in the early childhood space particularly related to technology and michelle was just talking about the potential to look at libraries as a source of professional development tell me a little bit about how you see libraries fitting in here and specifically some of the work that you're doing yeah um i don't know when the last time you went to a library story time was anybody okay so those of you who have may have noticed it's just really a fertile ground for helping parents to understand best practices that they can incorporate it's a great space for for great conversations about what's best for kids and it's also a place where library and children's librarians who i love are modeling best ways to read sing talk play write with kids um story times in our district for example have a play purposeful play period afterward where the librarians are actually roving and modeling open-ended questions to stimulate dialogic conversations that are rich they're um modeling positivity with parents they're now some story times they're experimenting to learn about the technology by incorporating digital experiences experimenting with apps with parents and talking about how to best use those technologies to help their kids learn and we're experimenting which is it makes me feel good that you said that's okay but i do feel like libraries are really unbelievable and i spent more than 20 years in education in the public schools and just came to libraries recently so i'm just absolutely blown away at the possibilities you know why because the parents are there with the kids and that's where i think that the key point is that this is an opportunity to reach out to the parent as the first best teacher and that's what librarians are doing through every child ready to read practices and in story times and programs and we're experimenting with programs like in our district we have one called Tech Together where it's actually parents with kids on laps and tablets on laps of kids and they're working together with a librarian helping to model the best use of the the app and then the kids talking engaging in rich conversations together with the parent so there are these opportunities for real learning experiences that i just want you to come visit it's it's very exciting i think this brings up a really great point that was made in the paper as well about the need for alignment across libraries and early education schools and other pediatricians offices because locally parents who do they go to when they have a question it's their family or it's their librarian or their early childhood teacher or their doctor and so if there was some sort of like aligned messaging and we're getting better about that but the idea that they're going to these different places and if they're hearing different things about how to use technology or whether they even should that's got to be a sort of confusing and overwhelming space to be in as a young parent let me jump into the shout out to the our librarian friends i think this topic because i've been out talking about it since the position statement came out in march of 2012 has created this amazing conversation and opportunity with informal educators be they children's librarians children's museum staff zoos a nature center staff out of school time programs folks that aren't usually in the same room at the same time are having very similar experiences and asking similar questions around how do we use these tools wisely what's the best way to proceed i think we have an opportunity to really form a new alliance in a way that that strengthens all of us and that that puts the librarian in a really critical place and if we're going to talk about access and equity then we have to focus on public libraries as a key part of that strategy and so i i just think and my own experience in the last year has been lots of excitement in the library community but as i said to you earlier also librarians who say no iPads in my library and early childhood teachers who say no technology in my early childhood program so we still have this this big continuum so i was talking about just some little examples of programs at the grassroots level but i want to shout out to ken cambell who is a california library person and she's really trying to forge ahead to mobilize librarians to be active in studying young children and digital experiences and i know has worked with chip and others writing a grant nash i'm reading it because she was just telling me about it national forum on young children new media and libraries working to get guidelines generate guidelines and train the trainer curriculum so that alignment's really going to be key so it's also key because many family child care providers that's where they're getting access right so if they don't have access in their home then we promote trying to get them to the library and then so if we have a common way of talking about it and we're all using the early learning standards like we do in pennsylvania and especially locally then that's where the access is going to happen and that that that librarian because he or she is in the community is trusted by that family child care provider and they feel like they can question more because they'll say to us but the librarian said michelle that this was an okay app so i think it's an okay app and of course the librarian said that so i think that that's that is critically important because that's where family child care providers go and we have to remember that's where our most at-risk children especially birth of three are spending their day absolutely and we want to collaborate we want to partner we want to be aligned and have these conversations so i'm going to open it up for questions in a couple minutes but before we do that because this is sort of an action-oriented policy conversation wanted to ask each of you to share if you were going to pick one number one action step related to policy that that sort of needs to be taken tomorrow to enable us to really capture the potential of technology to improve outcomes for young children what would it be leverage this kind of meeting to convene a conversation around teacher preparation standards and how they relate to preparing teachers to use digital media appropriately and intentionally mirror each other program at the local level because we know so much of this policy plays out locally whether it's in your district or in your state i'd say whatever table in your area is thinking about these types of questions to sort of take an inventory of what are the policies that are affecting technology ask yourselves are they aligned are they where we want to be do they reflect our values and the changing landscape we're seeing in our classrooms and really use that then to guide okay what are those small things we can change immediately to get some momentum and then what are then the bigger things that are going to take sort of a heavier lift for us but we're committing to do it just and as a practical matter that do you know of any frameworks or tools that currently exist that a local you know coalition or policymaker somebody could actually use to do that kind of an inventory great idea someone in this room to collaborate on creating that i think it would be it's so needed i think we're all just sort of figuring it out as we go along and that would be a fantastic tool i think it's one of the things that we've really done in pittsburgh right so we have the kids and creativity network and it really does bring this early childhood affinity group together which brings people from from the early childhood classroom to illa's team at the create lab to the children's museum i mean people that you wouldn't think would be in the room together to really put those easy wins on the table like cell phone policy to kind of bigger things of bigger lifts together so and how do we use our voices collectively because we know in advocacy the more voices you have the louder you are the more you could push push the agenda so it's been powerful that it's not always the early childhood community that policymakers are hearing from that we have an aligned message together so i think creating and of course we have such support in in in pittsburgh but how do you find those folks that are right there sort of under your under your nose that can be a the ally with you i think the other thing though is that we really need to push that screen time is not what we're talking about we have to separate the two and i know it's not going to happen overnight but i think that that is doing us that that is keeping us behind that we have to have definitions that separate those those two so i think that convening conversations like this with the um notion of elevating the workforce and including a broader range of people like we've talked about include the parents include the teachers librarians and researchers more frequently and right away to to get the level of understanding aligned i'd also like to ask a research question and this this hit me today and i'm wondering do we have research on why the ipad is something that parents seem to really like doing with their children have we just address that because i think that if we could talk about that more that i think it breaks down the sort of that it's passive or there's something innately wrong with it or what's good about it i think that we need to talk about what is the ipad doing for us as adult learners because you know i've learned a lot of things on that ipad that i never thought i would ever learn think about it both from my children and from my husband but i think that that i think that this device is sparking something about how we learn as adults so maybe that's why we want to do it with our kids because we it's sparking something in in us as well that we haven't experienced yet maybe it's like monopoly was when it was first invented it was so new everybody loved it was a great game still great game but i think there's something there in that and i would like to see some more research about that we're going to open it up for questions i am during this question time going to have my phone out because um we're going to be taking questions on twitter so if you are not in the room here with us but you have a burning question please tweet it um use the hashtag hashtag beyond screen time and i will get it on my phone and hopefully i will ask it if time permits so um all right who has a question ma'am thank you my name is edna ronk i live in the district of columbia and have been in the early childhood field for a long time and i'd like to answer michelle's question about the ipad there is an article in the march issue of young children call and i forget what it's called i just gave a copy to lisa it's written by gene geist a professor at the ohio state university and it's on using tablets using tablet using tablet commuters with the print gets light but it's with toddlers and very young children and he actually works with two-year-olds and under two and he goes into some he's done some research on it so check that um i would like to address two elephants in the room ma'am could you put it in the form of a question please yeah um there'll be a question um there are two words we haven't talked about too much we've skirted around them and i would like you to use what we've talked about today uh to address these two the two words that have a very negative image in the united states in many cases not all but you'll know what i mean the first word is play which is considered by many a waste of time um they're just playing they aren't learning anything and those of us who were here know better but it's a policy issue and the second word is government which has been considered a waste of everything this past year and as a political science major when i was very young that that whole experience in the fall disturbed me terribly i really really really did so i would like you to think about how um the media and all the words that we've used digital and technology and whatever um can be used to address the negative aspects of play and government thank you it's ironic but play is often thrown at those of us who want to talk about digital media is the thing that they can't do right so the same people who might be saying play isn't learning are saying oh but they can't they're not playing when they're using this so i think we're using these words you know to kind of make counter arguments and i think that's careful here here's another one hands-on is this hands-on i could make an argument that this is very hands-on but it's not hands-on with three-dimensional objects right so we're tripping over some of our most deeply held beliefs around early thousand so i'm not going to take on the government question i'll leave that to someone else but i think that um i think that technology has an opportunity for us to be able to assess the value of play and how it helps children learn so not only by what they're doing on the screen but how we use technology to assess how children are learning in the housekeeping area so message for me is a wonderful example of that right when you're actually using pictures that now have a message to them to use them to assess what a child is learning what you didn't know about the about the teacher in there that that actually is a school where children have hearing impairments so when she talked about the new vocabulary she was literally talking about words about children that have never spoken before so i think it has this opportunity to capture what children are actually learning through their play in a way that we really didn't have before except with the polaroid picture remember how excited we were with the polaroid pictures that was huge in our field right to capture things i think we can actually capture the learning through play i would just say that we actually term in our libraries our early learning area as a literacy playground and we're going to be incorporating more digital media lots of libraries already are that are actually in the playground as we would call it to send that message that this is a viable means of play as well as learning for learning through play and so i have a question from twitter which is how can we proactively play a role in app development for young children and i'll let you all decide who we in that question might be okay go ahead so now i'll give you a real life experience so we actually had um what we what we coined an unconference in pittsburgh hosted by the pittsburgh a y c and many many partners in this room where we actually had an opportunity to have a hackathon where every day early childhood teachers every day early childhood teachers brought an idea to the table about an app that could help them with their teaching not an app for children an app that could help them with their teaching and because we have such such resource like ila and other folks from carnegie melin and many other places they actually got to spend a whole day with app developers who listened to what it was like for them being everyday early childhood teachers talk about powerful learning on both parts right so it's about those everyday opportunities how do you make those opportunities where early childhood teachers get in the room with people who develop apps remember people who develop apps are probably between 20 something and 40 something right probably they probably have little children they're probably in a childcare center we have to tell our field to tap into the parents that they serve we have we have such a lost opportunity we have lost that opportunity we have to find that opportunity so get them in the room together and let them talk to to each other so this conversation is happening um warren bucklite from children's technology review hosts a conference called duster magic which is a room full of developers and a couple of us in the back who are child development people reminding them that we need to think about how children learn and i would add to your definition that developers i'm meeting our young male not married no kids and have an end of one understanding of children which is their own childhood right so there's a challenge here but i but the same folks are saying how do we do this better and the and the developers who are starting to really think nicely about child development and development toka boka comes to example are having economic success in the marketplace that'll drive the the need to have to do app development that actually supports um learning and development in a different way so i i well my my um call out to all of us is just get in the conversation can i add something fun about that that um so they're male and they don't have children and they're young and people in our world are female they're not married it was kind of neat to see these folks development yeah we're like how do we tap a happy hour actually make that they're like whoa there's a whole bunch of young women coming the best so you know children's librarians like aren't dying to get in the conversation too yeah yeah well that's one way to help market it right right um any questions in the room um uh sir hi i'm rob lippincott formally pbs now what's coming up i2 capital group um my question is we've been talking a lot today about all kinds of new ways of learning or aiding learning with technology is it from a policy perspective the right way to think about technology is kind of a shortcut to the common core as many people have been talking about it's a more productive way of teaching vocabulary english language arts math or is it really the sort of key this doorway to all kinds of other things design thinking and creativity and uh assessment and measurement and so in other words is it a is it a ruse to think of it as a shortcut to a common core is that something that's an easy win that we should get out of the way from a policy perspective i don't i'll take a crack and then um i wouldn't say it's a shortcut um i would say in in some sense it's it's kind of strange to have a um policy conversation when you're talking about pedagogy in classrooms because you really don't want to dictate for teachers what they should be able to do but we have to to some extent right because we want to prevent harm and we want to promote good but so to the extent that technology and digital media is just another tool that teachers can choose to integrate into their classrooms to support outcomes whether it's towards the common core or towards the early learning standards i think that's from my perspective at least how we sort of need to approach that but that said we all know and the reason we're all in this room is because technology and digital media are so invigorating to current classrooms it is really engaging material when you have the right prompts it can be such a powerful tool but i wouldn't say it's necessarily a shortcut so much as another tool that can help us get there and because we want to avoid the either or dichotomy right it isn't either the shortcut or all these other things it needs to be both and we need to take advantage of what works best and we need the community to talk to each other while the researchers are are catching up to our understanding we have teachers using these tools who need to be talking to other teachers about what works what doesn't work what i tried librarians or i think we need that conversation that community practice around this find the early adopters and let's get them talking to each other so i think we want to avoid it being just the shortcut too because then i i worry that it won't be developmentally appropriate anymore and then it turns into something that children it's not about what what is interesting that it interests the child so here's another twitter question at kids media doc would like to know how might the early childhood education and the pediatric community come together to have a more productive conversation about this stuff cool what better time than right now when one of the voices of the aps has decided that perhaps there's more to these things than we've seen before and is opening up the conversation and calling on his own colleagues to revisit a statement that really has a definition of screen time that's out of date one of the people that i called up so i think there's a better opportunity than ever i don't think we're oppositional i think we agree a lot more than we disagree and i think if we can start to bring people to those tables and get pediatricians offering advice in in their offices that's like what librarians are offering and what early childhood teachers now we're an hour on to something i think at the state level we're lucky in pennsylvania that we have a pediatrician that sits on our early learning council so i think states should look at that and say is there a pediatrician there that can be part of this conversation to help to help move policy then also on the local level we have some local pp pediatrician sitting with us and talking to us about how do we have a common language together so we have to take a proactive approach to that i think and we have to accept that it's a medical model versus a developmental model we're not all going to be talking the same language all the time and if it's do no harm and make sure children are healthy that's one conversation and then we're wanting to dig deeper into what developmentally positive so one more question from twitter before we wrap the panel up you know as people are talking about the need to think about outcomes in early childhood education which we know may be critical to addressing some of our resource issues are there ways we could use new technology to do that in a way that is developmentally appropriate and fun for kids even as we're collecting info i think michelle's point earlier about the great potential for assessment in developmentally appropriate ways that technology offers and the efficiencies that offers is there's huge potential there and some of the common assessments that we've been using in early childhood that are pretty time intensive that require a teacher sitting with a child doing it in assessment individually there's great potential to make those assessments continue to have them be play-based but digitize them such that it adapts to them it gives teachers feedback immediately so then they can individualize learning based on that feedback and then ideally that they can document that progress for these other reporting systems that now early childhood programs are more and more being required to report up to i'll just add to that that one thing you never see about message for me but to me is them is the best part about it is the back end that actually shows us how how parents are talking to their children what is the response what what teachers are saying so we can actually go back and see a see a history of how it's being used and then if if we can get that that to talk to whatever reporting system the teacher has to do so that's where geniuses come in because i think there's there's lots of reporting that has to be done it would be my dream that you could do it once and it could talk to all the other systems because teachers are spending a lot of time entering data for different assessments lots of times which wouldn't it be great if we could take a picture and it would be able to determine what the child has learned so it's a tool we need to use it intentionally and appropriately teachers need to be able to make decisions about what a tool for what assessment a tool for promoting learning that's why we need this in teacher preparation programs we can't just expect teachers to know how to do these things unless we have the opportunity to help them and librarians as well we need the professional development i think that was a great note to wrap up on since we're out of time so we fell turn it back over to you so thank you um thanks sarah for guiding that conversation i just thought it was really um kind of invigorating to think about it feels like we're in many ways we've already kind of broken broken through um in terms of what what seemed like such a dichotomy even two years ago when i was starting to explore these issues that felt like there were um some you know places where they're just we wouldn't be able to kind of maybe even have shared conversations and i did want to mention is in that question about pediatricians and early learning um development experts kind of coming together um i wanted you all to know that um in this event in fact in in other settings as well we're reaching out to the american academy of pediatrics aria brown um was invited just couldn't make it because of her schedule but i know the aap is um is watching we really hope to be engaged in more and more conversations with them um dimitri christakis who is a very well-known researcher at the university of washington who was referenced earlier who's been writing a lot about media and young kids and has been looking recently at content in some of the the differences there that very much aligns with what those in the learning community have been looking at when it relates to content um he too was really interested in this conversation and and just couldn't make it out here so i feel like we're at a place where there are people across the country who may have come from different angles on this um maybe five years ago even two years ago but want to find a find some common ground i also um feel the urgency so much from parents in part because a lot of what i do is go out and and talk to parent groups um probably because of my my previous research and the number of questions i mean i'll have like six or seven parents lining up with very specific questions about should i be using FaceTime for this long with my 14 month old or was that app not a good one to download or i mean a lot of them are worried a lot of them are excited it's sometimes both in the same question and um boy what a shame if those who are um the the early educators um in the librarians and the pediatricians and the lives of these families that they can't answer these questions for parents we're missing a huge huge opportunity to help them so i just wanted to kind of get that out of the way and now i agree with everything um it's just a real pleasure to have ellen and michael here i'll just do a quick introduction for those of you who don't know ellen wortella is the oh gosh the whole entire title the chic hamed bin califa alfany professor of humiliation and professor of psychology um and professor of human development and special policy at north westburn university time's up and and and so and ellen um has been looking at these issues for for for years um kind of with someone as i've started digging into the research that i've certainly relied on michael levine is the executive director this is easier at the jones cooney center at sesame workshop um for those who don't know and you can probably describe this better than i but the jones cooney center is is is separate from the research um the researchers within sesame workshop jennifer cotler clark is here from sesame who and she and rose my truly and others do the deep research on sesame street and other sesame product the jones cooney center is looking kind of in a way beyond and outside of that space um and thinking kind of about what's over the horizon and um and full disclosure michael and i are working on a project together right now for the campaign for grade level reading on early literacy and where technology fits in in that realm so i wanted to just take a moment given that i knew that they were coming i pulled them in to just um have a moment to wrap up a little bit and to hear some of their takes on this we did um get some interesting and i think creative action item ideas out of some of the the panels and there may be more um that we can generate during the happy hour because you know wine and beer often helps in that regard but i'm going to list a few of them and um and see what you think and then i'll let the two of you just talk for a little bit we've got until about 4 30 and then we'll break so here are some things that came up in that first panel um so lauren rubensall um at uh children's hospital of boston was talking about the need to really um is there a way we could create resources in one place easy to use resources for parents um so that they could and lauren i'm probably putting the wrong the wrong words on this exactly but really so that they could understand better how they could use their own language and questions to interact with children around around media but just in their own own lives you know really have a spark conversation shelly um pasnick had suggested that we really need to get into communities and really understand the needs on the ground in communities before making assumptions about what technology might be needed or whether not needed right in different communities and really start you know digging into what's happening in local places ilah has um pointed out the certainly the importance of um of partnering of math science partnerships is is what we have down here that the ability to bring those who are working in the realm of research bring them together with educators to um see what might be possible and in generating new environments for kids and ilah please feel free to to jump in with with more on that one it is okay leslie um wrote from pbs um pointed out that we really need much more community engagement and support um around early early learning programs and how media fits into them in our last panel michelle um pointed out just in her comments and this wasn't even at the end but i just started writing them down that there were three things that she wanted to see happen better connectivity in classrooms using badging or other kinds of uh this is in a technology in itself to recognize the competencies that may exist in our early childhood workforce or to motivate those um who may have some of these competencies to acquire them i mean who want those competencies to acquire them and to be more flexible in the way we think about professional development hours um and to include libraries include that moment when an early childhood teacher might go to a library to be part of a workshop to recognize that that too might be part of that teachers learning even if the librarian offering the workshop doesn't necessarily have the exact right credential um other things that came up um during the end of the conversation just a few minutes ago um starting to really leverage conversations like this i'm all up for that to have deeper conversations on teacher teacher preparation generally uh i mean i'm sorry teacher preparation more specifically and make sure that when we talk about teachers and educators we're we're wide enough to include librarians and other early literacy or early math specialists in that educator mix um another action and take an inventory of what policies um are either getting in the way of or causing kind of the wrong and maybe inappropriate use of um so getting in the way of good practice or causing bad practice when it comes to technology's use and sarah suggested well i didn't suggest but i think it came out of your question the way is there a tool to do that and um gosh maybe there isn't and does there need to be a tool created to help take that inventory of of what's happening in in um in localities and then through policy generally last two um start to bring different people around the table so it's not just the early childhood community talking to the early childhood community and not just the pediatricians talking to the pediatricians um how can we spark what's happened in pittsburgh where they have you know robotics professors talking to preschool teachers like wow how do we get how do we get to that um and then lastly what kind of research could be done on how tablets or these kinds of portable screens are um are helping adult learners maybe even make more visible of their own learning or recognizing what they what their needs are okay someone want to write a paper about that um that is a great great wrap-up um hi everybody i'm gonna i'm gonna actually i had jotted down some of those things and i had um four observations that overlap and then i had six action items and i'm not going to go through all of them but i just want you to know that i i do have them down here um the four observations were yes this bigger community first of all congratulations i won't spend too much time but this is a rare sighting and the policy brief is excellent and i think that you have started over the last few years you know with others in the field a tremendously important conversation i think that what you just identified around the community of practice who needs to come together i think was signaled and modeled by this convening we need more of it that the fact that lauren was on the same panel as leah is really an indication of something that's right so we need a reframing that is not just health and consumption oriented and not just learning and pathway to common core oriented we need the kind of integration that is inextricable around human development so ellen and i are both sort of you know ecological systems theorists so we're going to say this so what's what what's the pathway and i think that we're making progress on who the new community is but we need to really do a lot more on these inextricable you know community ties and getting like one action item there is if we could find a way to get aap any yc ala you know these professional standard bearers srcd in roughly the same place roughly the same place that would be actually a lot of progress and i think it's going to come up from the roots of places like pittsburgh second very quick you know observation stop generalizing this has came up in sort of your opening comments let's have an honest discussion not all screens are equal not all consumption is equal i thought that shelly added very significantly to the three c's conversation you didn't you didn't bring that up but i thought uh her three c's of um uh the caregivers yeah the caregivers we had a lot of commentary about the caregivers and you know the creativity c also was something that aliyah was all about let's let's reintroduce given the structure so the infrastructure for early childhood is weaker and for health care or for k-12 but that flexibility and that lack of infrastructure might actually be a real advantage to us if we took advantage if we skipped a little bit of a generation of program design and we thought about technology and media in a new way that flexibility might actually be real benefit so that's and the the catch in the equity the equity chasm those are really really interesting things you know as far as i was concerned um and then just a couple of the action ideas yes i do think that we need a new kit a new resource a new way to use the mediaticians and the you know developmental lists in the room um in in common enterprise i think that's a good challenge for this group it's a good challenge for the alliance that i'm a member of um i thought that it was a really really interesting challenge that um both chip and shelly you know brought up which was and i i missed i missed this in terms of my first question not really about productivity it is in policy language assessment as michelle was starting to talk about you know the amount of stuff that you just have to write down this issue of actually using technology for assessment productivity but also for innovation and for reinventing no practice is something that we really need to talk about and then finally um i thought mark begrosian uh and and we've been doing some work on this i'm a little bit self interested this issue of dual generation approaches is fundamental to moving in the next direction whether it's around you know what we expect a child to be on the pathway what we expect an adult to be on in certain lifelong learning so we're i think our field has a possibility my last thing to say to go from um these sort of pathways that relate to you know educational skills to pathways that relate to life life lifelong learning we can get the normative experience of the children you know in the very early ages as sort of a down payment for a new model ellen and i were talking about this and maybe she'll pick it up a new model in which we were really much more clear what we expected kids to be at the end of the loop or along the loop then we'd have a much more intelligent conversation about why it is or why it isn't that we have technology being introduced into playful learning creativity and intentional educational online i'll stop so why don't i take it from there um i thought that that um the panel about research was interesting and the two one of the takeaways i had from that was um from illa and um shelly's comments that that both of you really articulated a vision of what you want this child to grow up to be as an adult i don't think we talk about that very much what kind of an adult do we want um i thought it was interesting illa you want an adult who is creative in and using all kinds of technology as a tool in solving what will be the future generations problems that may not be our problems and that i'm i'm right there i agree with you and shelly i thought your comments bespoke an interest in having um even in this era of where technology is everywhere all the time and will only be more so in all likelihood in future generations um an adult who appreciates human relationships and personal relationships and connectedness with people you know i think we should spend some time what is it that we want our children to grow up to be and i don't mean just yes i want my child to be healthy and yes i want my child to have a career that's successful and and a family but what kind of world do we expect them to enter and how do we get there and that i think we don't spend time with at all um and i don't think we you really prompted me to think about that michael and i started to have a discussion of where where does technology fit because it's in all likelihood um technology is not an an and an extra it is now integrated in the development of human beings just one aside um asking about how you integrate technology into these other areas about a half a dozen years or so ago i i was on some rant and i don't remember why but i looked at all introductory child development textbooks that were available in the country and i found on average of a 300 to 400 page textbook about a half a dozen pages at most devoted to any media and most of what they were teaching people who are studying child development was how bad television violence was for children no appreciation whatsoever in the education about child development the changing nature of children's realities which is their integration into a technologized world i suspect that hasn't changed very much um maybe now there'll be a few more pages that talk about computers and my explanation of why we like tablets is because we think of them as computer-like not television-like and screen is really a substitute for television if you go back and look at what all of those earlier um um pro proclamations about not having children have screen time they really meant don't let your child watch entertainment television so we could get rid of screens because that's irrelevant now what we really should be talking about is the content and and technologies as far as i'm concerned so that's one point who do we want our children to be secondly and i'm not just pandering to the to one of the people who supported this conference which again it is wonderful and thank you for inviting me back i had a great time in the fall and i'm having a great time here but i think we should take a look at what's going on in pittsburgh as a model to be taken around around the country if there is a place and here the grable foundation and the other foundations in pittsburgh should hats off to you what you've created at a community level which is digestible for parents and teachers and children is a community that cares about children in a multiplicity of ways and in which technology is secondary to the larger questions about children's development and i just um i had the privilege with lisa actually was the three of us it's all about aiming high you guys we uh we had the privilege of being of being on the same visit to pittsburgh and i still use examples of things that i've learned and and the ability to integrate at that local level is so important because that's where parents and children live and to be able to integrate across institutions so that was the second point that i wanted to make let's use kids pittsburgh as a model for what we try to take to our local communities and i had a third question that i wanted um you know i think it's a really good question if we think about who we want our children to be of what really are the skills we want children young children to have there's this this speeding up of what our expectations are um we what we expected several years you know when sesame street was started we wanted to teach uh kindergartners for five and six year olds their letters from i to recognize all the letters and their numbers from one to ten well now we aim to teach far more than that to two-year-olds we have such higher expectations for what we want from children i wonder to what extent this playfulness of technology and this integration of technology is going to speed that up even more and i think we really need to think about um children's lives in a different way and and maybe slowing down for more playfulness and i'll shut up because we only have one more minute so i know that many of you may have comments and questions and i encourage lots of conversations during the break i am so on time i can't believe it um and i uh and i and i really want to encourage you um those of you out there watching as well as this view in the room to be in touch with us here at new america um certainly to be in touch with the members of of the alliance as they're thinking about their you know next steps but if there's something that i don't know even if it's like i don't think you got it wrong like i really want you to like think harder about this tell me tell us right um because i think we have to have this as an open conversation as much as possible can i make one last 10 second yes yes so the brief wasn't discussed enough today and i want to i want to encourage folks in the room as well as us and i'm sure lisa will too but as a friend of lisa's to comment on this and actually i've already begun in my notes on the brief to formulate specific action steps that we could take as a down payment towards the policy agenda there's very provocative questions in here there's actually directional questions in the brief that would lead to actions like you know looking at the acres looking at looking at the class looking you know in and thinking careful thoughts about the role of technology in media in these different instruments of professional reform for example and so i think that as a community we should embrace the brief as a little bit of a set of guideposts for us to move over the next six to twelve months and in particular given all the introduction and all the interest allegedly in the administration right now in early childhood i completely concur with that and here's an example of where we can i think it's a terrific brief we could all be on the same page and aligned in the way that you're asking for in a shell that we could all be aligned in pushing forward so please stay in the space lisa since you since your first look you've been really important to us it's really important thank you thank you so much you guys


Determined to ensure a peaceful relationship between farmers and headers, Governor Abdulahi Ganduji has thrown his weight behind the establishment of ranches in the country. Ganduji's position was endorsed by the Vice President of the Islamic Development Bank, Mansur Motar, who said it was unfortunate that between 2016 and now, at least 4,000 people lost their lives in the recurring conflicts between farmers and headers with several thousand others sustaining injuries, both physical and emotional. The duo spoke during the opening ceremony of the National Conference on Livestock Reform and Mitigation of Associated Conflicts Between Headers and Farmers held in Abuja. Existential problems as posturalists would have lands to graze without cattle encroaching on people's farmlands. The growing number of casualties associated with it, between 2016 and now, at least 4,000, more than 4,000 people, and that's a very conservative estimate referring to the figures that have been reported. These people have lost their lives in these conflicts. So if you know you can keep peace without fighting wars, why do you go into war? And that's why I believe in dialogue. So let's continue to sit together and discuss on issues that face us in all our lives. So you get notified about fresh news updates.