Navigating How and When to Use Tech When Teaching Young Children

Early childhood educators make thousands of decisions each day. Among them are decisions around technology use with their young learners, which are too often shaped by policies and pedagogies that lag behind the latest research and the abundance of available options.

In January and February, New America’s Learning Sciences Exchange (LSX) program and Early and Elementary Education policy program partnered to host a two-part webinar series, helping educators, policymakers, and parents navigate the latest guidance. Researchers, pediatricians, media specialists, and early childhood educators gathered to discuss the evidence and everyday decisions around how technology should be used with children between pre-K and third grade, which types and amounts are appropriate, and whether various forms should be used at all.

During the first webinar, which centered on advice emerging from the latest research, Jenny Radesky, author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) policy statements on digital media use in early childhood and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School, highlighted the AAP’s recently released 5Cs of Media Use. The framework, aimed at parents and clinicians, builds upon the 3Cs developed by Lisa Guernsey in her book Screen Time and expanded upon in Tap, Click, Read with co-author Michael Levine. That framework, rooted in the science of child development, focused on the importance of considering each child’s interests and learning needs, ensuring that the content they’re engaging with is high-quality and designed for the age and developmental stage of the child, and evaluating technology use around the context of a child’s whole day.

The AAP’s newest guidance adds more detail on the context point by encouraging parents to reflect on when and how tech use crowds out other activities, to establish frequent communication with their children about what they are watching or playing with and why, and to gauge whether tech use may hinder a child’s ability to calm down when they need to rest or regulate their emotions.

There are really almost no absolutes in the work of early childhood education.

The webinar also featured guidance from the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), highlighting the many considerations that come with questions about tech use and kids. “There are really almost no absolutes in the work of early childhood education,” said Alissa Mwenelupembe, NAEYC’s managing director of early learning. She emphasized the core considerations that must inform educators’ decision-making around tech use: the individualities of each child, the commonalities found in the research on child development, and the contexts of children’s lives, which lay the foundation of developmentally appropriate practice.

“One of my favorite things about developmentally appropriate practice is that when you use it as a lens or as a framework to answer a question or explore a topic, the answer you usually come up with is: it depends, ” Mwenelupembe said.

Given the nuance, it’s unsurprising that early childhood educators’ attitudes around and usage of technology in their classrooms varies widely. Rebecca Dore, director of research at Ohio State University, shared a 2020 survey of pre-K teachers, which found that 37 percent of them reported never using tablets with students, while 20 percent reported using them daily.

This research came alive during the second webinar, when Beth Williams, a second grade teacher from Seattle, WA, shared the ways she uses touchscreen technology, like iPads, to introduce new concepts, reinforce skills, and differentiate instruction. “I have students that, when they see a pencil, they immediately freeze,” Williams said. “But if I give them math facts on the iPad, they will do so much more, they're able to show their learning, and they're willing to practice.” Her students can regularly be found reading ebooks in the Epic School library and enjoying the support of its voice-to-text features, or using Book Creator to compose their own published works.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, IL, Rachel Giannini and her pre-K colleagues only make use of technology when a hands-on, play-based experience isn’t feasible. “If the children are showing a great interest in sea animals, we live in Chicago in the middle of the winter, so we can listen to some whale sounds… and that can be a catalyst to something else,” Giannini said. “We see our space as almost a vacation from the technology—it will always be in their life. They are probably pretty savvy at it outside of this, so this is this opportunity to work on those high-quality interactions, work on problem-solving, and conflict resolution.”

When we bring tech to our school, we ask, ‘how might this tool, whether it's a robot or a tablet or something else, provide an opportunity that does not already exist in the classroom? How can it increase children's ability to actively learn?’

The intentionality around these technology decisions was evident across both webinars. “When we bring tech to our school,” said Amy Turcotte, an early childhood tech coach at Project Eagle Head Start in Kansas City, KS, “we ask, ‘how might this tool, whether it's a robot or a tablet or something else, provide an opportunity that does not already exist in the classroom? How can it increase children's ability to actively learn?’” She continued, “Does learning this tool help build life skills like resilience, empathy, and problem solving?” Turcotte added that educators must consider whether the digital tools they select represent their students’ languages, thoughts, and experiences.

Panelists agreed that, while digital tools hold tremendous potential to personalize learning and offer a glimpse at worlds far beyond their classrooms, access remains uneven. According to Lydia Carlis, chief learning and impact officer at Acelero Learning, she and her colleagues consider three factors to “ensure that technology is serving as a tool for fairness rather than another source of disparity.” They determine whether all children will have access to digital tools regardless of their socioeconomic status, geography, or ability level; whether the tools are representative of the children they serve and their needs; and, “whether or not teachers can utilize the information that comes from the technology to help them support children’s learning.”

To Carlis’s last point, data collection and analysis was raised as a key leverage point for digital tools, like tablets, in early education. Sharon Huang, senior associate of family well-being and children’s development at MDRC, shared how listening sessions with early educators revealed the sense of being overwhelmed and the difficulty, and often impracticality, of continuously collecting and analyzing data for large numbers of children. She suggested that short, game-based assessment tools, like those being developed in research projects funded through MDRC, hold the potential to provide more “accurate, timely, reliable information about children’s development,” and free up more of teachers’ time for interaction and instruction.

Huang also underscored out how much the early childhood details matter when designing digital tools. “Do their classrooms have internet access?,” she asked. “In many early childhood programs the internet connection is unreliable at best. Also, if you're asking children to listen to audio, do they need headphones? Will they be able to hear what's happening in the middle of a noisy classroom? And, if children need to log on to their own accounts to use an app, what is the easiest way to do that?”

On a much smaller scale, Williams, the second grade teacher, recalled discovering that laptops didn’t work well with her students' hands and switching to iPads instead. Turcotte stressed the importance of developing young children’s fine motor skills so they have the dexterity to isolate their pointer fingers and use those tablets once they do reach second grade.

To that end, I had the opportunity to participate in the second webinar, as a former kindergarten teacher at a dual language Spanish-English immersion school. I emphasized the importance of bringing early educators and researchers to the table when developing tech tools, to ensure that they’re practical for early childhood settings and truly meeting students’ needs. I also recommended using tech tools, like game-based assessments, to assess English Learners’ skills in their home language in addition to English, in order to have a more complete picture of students’ knowledge and strengths.

Overall, panelists agreed that while educators and parents have an uphill battle selecting for quality amid the abundance of content and tools, they can likely stress a bit less around children’s screen time.

“This idea of just focusing on screen time has become a less helpful concept. Screen time is only one dimension,” Radesky explained. “There's lots of research showing that the quality of content really shapes children's outcomes. In early childhood, higher screen time is associated with language delays, but not if kids are watching high-quality content like PBS Kids or Sesame Street, right? So that is what shows us that if you design media with kids' needs in mind, you can have much better outcomes.”

Dore agreed. “Many researchers have started to conclude that there's actually little evidence for a recommendation to limit children's media use to a specific set amount of time each day,” Dore said. She suggested that caregivers and educators prioritize quality, and advised them to select programs in which educational content is relevant to the storyline or game. She also encouraged adults making tech decisions to avoid apps or tech tools with too many distracting features, and to embrace the repetition that children seek.

Dore, and other colleagues in the webinars, also promoted joint media engagement, which, as she explained, “is just a sort of fancy term for using media with children, which has been shown to promote learning.”

These interdisciplinary conversations with early childhood experts gain evergrowing import as technology rapidly evolves and makes its way into young children’s classrooms and homes. One opportunity to lend your voice to this salient dialogue will be coming later this year. As Mwenelupembe shared, NAEYC will be updating its 2012 Position Statement on Technology and Interactive Media with new guidance, including considerations around artificial intelligence and its place in the early childhood classroom. They’ll begin seeking input from members in the coming months.