Young Children with Access to iPads

Do you ever see kids with iPads in their hands and wonder, how can they have an iPad when I don't even have one? Some parents believe that introducing their kids to the iPad is just another way to get them ready for the ever-changing advances in today's world of technology, along with possibly exposing it as an educational tool. Other parents shun the idea of allowing young children get their hands on an iPad due to the popular idea that technology creates addiction and may encourage inactivity.

According to a study done by Common Sense Media in 2011, 52% of kids under the age of eight had access to devices at home that ranged from iPads, iPods, and smartphones. These statistics can be alarming for some parents, but keep in mind that this study was done in the United States with a small population sample of about 1,400 people. The most interesting and informative article I have found upon the topic of young children with iPads was by Psychology Today, which went over key points as to how using the iPad may be negatively affecting cognitive and sensory stimulation in young children.

Here are some of the key take-away points discussed in the article:

• The moving screen attracts attention, but it is passive attention - solely watching it.
• Like the iPad, screens give very limited sensory information compared to all the senses that the children could be experiencing playing with toys.
• Screens are two-dimensional and do not require children to create three-dimensional worlds.
• Staring at screens can lead to lack of sunlight and damage to the development of the eyes.  

After reading these key ideas, many of you may start seeing the logic behind this argument.

From personal experience of visiting my nephews and niece, I can tell that the iPad among young children have a growing popularity. During many visits, the first thing I see when I step inside their home is iPads in the hands of young children who have their eyes glued intensely onto the screen. They are sitting together, but are in their individual worlds within each of their iPads. Even though their parents monitor their time on the iPad, there are still many cons to spending time with an iPad. Sure, they know how to operate one better than I do, but once the iPad runs out of battery, they end up turning on other game consoles or tuning to their favorite channel on the TV. For now, I would personally say that it is better to keep young children away from electronics, such as the iPad, iPod, and smartphones. It may help them in the future to start using it in moderation when they are older than the age of eight or so.

How Technology Affects Attention Span

One of the major ways that technology is affecting children today involve their attention span. Our attention span is all about how long we can mentally keep focus on a certain activity. It also relies on patience. Kids today that have access to technology such as computers, iPads, and the sorts at such an early age is decreasing their attention span. How many of you get impatient when an Internet page takes longer than a few seconds to load? If I had to be honest, I would admit that I have closed many pages due to its' load time. From my own experience, I can believe that the Internet is correlated with increased impatience and decreased attention span. Before there was Internet, using a computer was all about Minesweeper, Pinball, and Paint - which none required loading - but now you can open a hundred different tabs on a browser, quickly moving back and forth between them. I know that for myself, this is the case. I can have ten tabs open and spend about ten minutes on each page before having the urge to move on and look through my other open tabs. The impatience comes when you are accustomed to having everything load quickly within seconds to having to wait. This generation is taught that plugging something into Google search will give you millions of results or answers within 0.39 seconds. I don't think I have ever seen Google search display any time that was longer than 60 seconds.

There is an article called, "How Technology is Changing the Way Children Think and Focus" that I found on Psychology Today which uses cognitive science to support the claim that technology is decreasing the attention span of kids. It asserts that with technology, kids learn to skim and divide their attention between several activities. This causes them to lose focus on a single activity, which is where the decline in attention span comes from. As mentioned earlier, this may stem from things such as having multiple tabs and activities open at once while you are trying to split up the time you spend with each of those tabs. How much are you retaining?

Here are a few simple things to keep in mind about technology and attention span:

• Before technology - majority of time spent reading books, which requires full attention, concentration, imagination, and memory of events
• Television era - visual stimulation, minimum imagination use, and minimum attention needed
• Internet era - vast environment, plenty of distractions, no focus or memorization needed
• Internet opens up a variety of things to do BUT:
• Too many things to do eliminates need to focus on a single activity
• Always available search engines eliminate the need to memorize info

After reading this post, do you see any of these points as being true to your Internet usage? I sure do. As I continue to make more blog posts, I will examine other ways that technology and entertainment media affects kids today.

How Much Technology is Too Much?

In today's world, children are spending an increased amount of time with technology, ranging from watching television, using the computer, and playing on iPhones and iPads. Well, you might be asking in your head exactly how many hours is this "increased amount of time". According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the average amount of time each day that children spend on entertainment media is seven hours. There is only twenty four hours in a day which means that about a third of their day is going towards spending time with entertainment media. Some of you may be in disbelief, but others may think that seven hours is not too bad (just think about the hour spent on Facebook, the two hours spent watching Youtube clips, the three hours on other social media sites, and the four plus hours streaming Netflix in the background). Not to mention, playing games on the iPhone or iPad has become increasingly popular, not only among teens but also children as young as the age of 3. There is a non-profit organization based in San Francisco called Common Sense Media that educates parents about how children are using media today. According to a New York Times article, “Technology Is Changing How Students Learn”, one of their researchers from Common Sense Media, Vicky Rideout, has shown that media use among children and teenagers have increased drastically. The average findings showed that those who are ages 8 to 18 spend twice as much time with screens each year as they spend in school. To me, school already fills up a large amount of time each day. Can you even imagine spending one year in school that would equal two years of time with a screen?

Let's just travel back for a second to when we were elementary school kids. The majority of elementary schools would normally end around 3:00 pm each day. If you add that average of seven hours spent with entertainment media that we found earlier, it would already be 10:00 pm. Where do they place the reading time, eating time, or the outdoor play time? Of course this is a very generalized scenario, but even so, you must be wondering about the things that these kids are missing out on. I remember playing basketball and jump rope in my living room when I was in elementary school, but it seems that as time goes by, those activities are forgotten. Maybe the interactive video games that kids play are replacing the real activities. For example, kids who play Wii sports (basketball, tennis, bowling, biking) on the game console rather than going outdoors to do these activities. Even though the video games can be quite realistic, I do not believe that it could ever replace the real deal. Now, you may be wondering exactly how does this technology usage affects young children. Stay tuned to find out in my later posts!

If You're Wondering Why I'm Writing...

Day Camp Field Trip - SF Zoo

My interest and passion for teaching young kids started four-five years ago in the summer of 9th grade. During that summer, me and my close friends volunteered as day camp counselors at a summer camp. Many kids attend summer day camps because their parents have to work during the day. That is where we come in to help. We planned six weeks of lessons and activities for a group of about fifteen kids. It was easily one of the best summers I had. Before the six weeks of camp started, we had to go through a week of training. We were taught how to take care of kids and meet their needs while also learning how to handle situations if they do not behave well. I definitely learned a lot within that week of training and began to bond with fellow camp counselors. Although it is a cliche saying, it is true when I say that nothing could of fully prepared us all for the next unpredictable six weeks to come. As the weeks wore on, I ended up coming home more and more exhausted. My energy and patience was slowly getting drained away. It was a full day or arriving at 8am and working until 5pm, then having a staff meeting and clean-up until at least 6-7pm. After volunteering, I would head home to eat dinner and then start planning lessons for the next day. The weekends were full of hanging out and bonding with each other as co-workers to close friends. There was not much resting time. Long story short, in the end, I realized how much I grew from this experience. All the camp counselors had an extremely tight bond, and as for the kids, they received attention, discipline, and love throughout their summer. It is an amazing feeling when a few years have passed and they can still remember you when they see you. That is just one of the many benefits of becoming a teacher.

After deciding on the broad topic of my blog: kids and their development, I had to focus on something more specific. I decided to concentrate on how technology affects kids today. Kids using high-tech technology can be easily seen everywhere you go these days. You see kids in elementary school who get to use their parents' iPhone when they are on the bus or waiting for seats at a restaurant. It has become the new way of entertainment, a new way of learning, and possibly even a substitute for parental attention. If technology affects the way that kids act and learn, then it must also be affecting the ways that teachers must teach. My future blog posts will fill all of you in about how technology is affecting kids today!