This post will look at those people that learn best when utilizing technology. In the early childhood world this actually stirs up some controversy. Many early childhood experts believe that very young children should be exposed to as little technology as possible to give them the opportunity to develop skills that seem to be suffering since the advent of high tech learning. I will look at this and the other side that believes that we should take advantage of the tech savviness all small children seem to have.
For the Love of Sesame Street
I will start this discussion with my own experience in childhood with what was considered high-tech learning at the time. I did not attend preschool. My preschool experience was Sesame Street. How much did I learn from watching Sesame Street? Quite a bit. I learned all my letters and sounds. I learned my numbers, shapes, and all that basic information. Sesame Street from the 70s did a marvelous job of teaching children the preschool basics. I also watched Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and The Electric Company. Therefore, I spent about 1 hour and 30 minutes every weekday learning from a high-tech source. The rest of my day was spent in free-play either outside or in the house.
Fluff or Substance
Now, high tech learning involves the internet and various and assorted electronic gadgets of all kinds as well as educational television. How much do children today learn from all this educational media? Here is where we hit the sticking point. The educational television of the 1970s was very academic dense. The format that was used was cutting edge, but they did not worry as much about entertainment value as they do now. Now what passes for high-tech learning is much more fluff than academics sometimes. When it is academic rich, sometimes it is too helpful to be as effective as those first high-tech learning experiences. Technology has become a crutch for us as a society, and that is passing down to our children.
The Need for Free Play
Another huge difference between my experience with high-tech learning and today's children's experience, revolves around the amount of free-play time I had. Free-play could easily be put on the endangered species list. My high-tech learning was offset by the enormous amount of free-play time I enjoyed. Today children spend much more than 1 hour and 30 minutes in front of some sort of screen. Plus, unless all they watch is PBS, it is nowhere near the academic content of my 1 hour and 30 minutes of screen time. Today's educational video games help the children too much to be anywhere near as effective as the first seasons of Sesame Street. In fact, all educational programming has evolved to be much more watered down for various and assorted reasons. What are those reasons? Many of them I find to be flat-out racist. If I were a minority, I would be completely insulted when they insinuate that my children are less capable of picking up educational concepts than other races. However, that is exactly the reasoning given for the dumbing down of everything these days. They do not state it exactly like that, but that is exactly what they mean.
The Need for Low-Tech Learning in the Early Years
With all that said, I actually fall into the camp of the anti-high-tech learning for toddlers and preschoolers. I do not mind a small amount of exposure to good quality high-tech learning as long as it is greatly offset by free-play and low-tech learning. Most of today's children get enough exposure to technology simply because many parents hand them a cell phone to keep them entertained when the parents have had enough. Therefore, many of today's children are in desperate need of low-tech learning experiences. They can probably manipulate a cell phone better than I can, but are they learning the preschool basics from their experience? NO!!!! What they learn makes all the difference in the world as to how effective the learning is for the children.
The Balance
Then why are all the schools so completely sold on transferring to a high-tech learning environment? Here is where the early childhood community and the public educational world butt heads constantly. The public educational system has a point that children of today's society must be able to function in a highly digital world. The early childhood community has a point that technology is becoming a crutch for people in today's society actually lowering our intelligence as compared to previous generations. Where is the middle ground in this argument? Actually if you take both camps arguments and apply them to the other side in a way, you will get your answer. Learning to manipulate technology is important, but not when that technology does the thinking for the person. Basic learning probably does need to stay in the low-tech world until the child has a good grasp on the basics.
High-Tech in the Early Years
Now let us take this into the early childhood world. Is it all right to give young children exposure to high-tech learning? I say yes as long as you, the teacher, are doing most of the teaching and leave the practice of skills to high-tech learning devices. If you are relying on technology to do the teaching for you, then you are not using high-tech learning devices in a way that will truly benefit the child long term. The same is true when children reach school-age. If the teachers are leaving the teaching to the high-tech devices, you may want to find your child a different teacher. We actually ran into this problem with one of my granddaughter's teachers. This teacher was trying to teach many skills solely through high-tech learning methods and my granddaughter basically lost an entire year of instruction. Fortunately, in the next grade her teacher was marvelous and fixed a multitude of issues. However, my granddaughter loves math games on the computer. She benefits from practice of skills on high-tech learning devices, but she needs the teacher to teach the basics first. In today's society many, many children can benefit from practice of skills using high-tech devices because of their natural savviness with such devices, but please do not overlook the direct instruction necessary for the teaching of initial concepts. AND do not overlook a child's need for free-play times away from all screens.
I hope you have enjoyed this post. Goodbye and God bless!!
Check out Natalie's children's books at: https://www.amazon.com/author/nataliewade7457
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