Interactive TV builds literacy skills among low-income kids

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>> I'm Carl Lorente assumed spelling and I'm an education researcher in the Center for Technology and Learning at SRI International. I started my career as a special education teacher and then did my graduate work in developmental psychology.

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>> We're working on research for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. We're targeting 2-8year old children from lower income communities and trying to help them through public media to learn basic skills that will help them prepare for school, especially literacy skills. The whole idea of the experience was built around the idea of active engagement. So far from kids sitting down and being babysat by televisions or media programming these kids were actively engaged in viewing.

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>> So what they would do is they'd watch the video's with their teachers and with their peers and at strategic moments the teacher would pause the video and they would build activities on top of whatever experience was going on and they would discuss what they were seeing and they would jump off from the media. What we learned from the study was the kids could actually learn letters, they could learn letter sounds and they could learn about the concepts of print so how a book works, or how print works moving from left to right, top to bottom.

>> I think it's really important that no one think of technology as a magic solution to any problem. I think that's what's important and what the research tells us is that the thoughtful, careful, selective application of technology in different learning environments from preschool classrooms to K,12 classrooms, to other areas of like can have a really powerful effect on learning when it's done well and it's supported and the people that are using that technology are prepared to use it and have training and support but it can be very powerful as a learning tool.

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>> Way to go super readers.

>> Ok.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====