 Welcome everyone. Welcome to our webinar, Media Mentors Helping Children Build Literacy Skills for the Digital Age. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Susan Hope-Arts, the Training and Education Manager here at TechSoup. And I'll also be your facilitator for this webinar. TechSoup is fortunate and we're excited to work with the Early Learning Lab to present this webinar, which is the second in a series of four webinars for the Early Learning Community. We do want this presentation to be relevant to the important work you do with and for young children. So we appreciate the time that you took to answer the registration questions. Also, your opinion is very important to us as we develop the other two webinars in this series. Please do take the time to complete the survey at the end of this webinar. I want to talk a little bit about ReadyTalk, which is the platform we use to present the information. On the lower left-hand corner of your screen you should see a chat box. In this chat box you can ask all of your burning questions, anything you would like to ask the presenters. You can also chat any problems you're having with audio or visual. Becky Wiegand, our webinar training manager is on the back end and she'll be helping you with all of those questions. If you lose your Internet connection you can always reconnect using the link in your registration or reminder email. If you're hearing an echo, it could be that you're logged in twice. Most sound will come through computer speakers, but if you're having any difficulty with audio you can also dial in using the toll-free line listed in your registration email. We are recording this presentation for later archiving on our TechSoup webinar page and the Early Learning Lab. This recording should be ready for you in about a week. On our webinar page at www.techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. This is a location where we share all of our webinar recordings and announce upcoming events. You can also review the recorded webinar and videos on our YouTube channel, which is www.youtube.com slash TechSoup video. Again, you will receive a follow-up email with a link to the recording, a presentation, PowerPoint, as well as any resources we share today. We will also try to compile a list of frequently asked questions that will also accompany that email. If you're following along with Twitter you can tweet us at TechSoup or using hashtag TSWebinar. As I mentioned we are thrilled to be partnering with the Early Learning Lab. Today we have Shatel Singh here with us. She is the Director of Design and Innovation at the Early Learning Lab where she works to build the capacity for innovation and the use of new technologies for preschools and community-based organizations working with families of children birth through 5. Her work at the Early Learning Lab builds upon 15 years of experience in digital media and technology to solve social problems. Also joining us today is Chip. Chip is the Director of Tech Center at Erickson Institute in Chicago and he is also a Senior Fellow and Member of the Advisory Board of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media at St. Vincent College. He is Editor of Technology and Digital Media in the Early Years Tools for Teaching and Learning and is editing a new book, Family Engagement in the Digital Age, Early Childhood Educators as Media Mentors. In 2012 he received the BAMI Award and Educators Voice Award as Innovator of the Year from the Academy of Education, Arts, and Sciences. We also have joining us Lisa Guernsey. She's the Director of Early Education Initiatives and the Learning Technologies Project in the Education Policy Program at New America. She leads teams of writers and analysts to tell stories, examine policies, and generate ideas for new approaches to helping disadvantaged students succeed. We also have Michael. Michael is the Founding Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. And the Center conducts research, builds multi-sector alliances, and catalyzes industry and policy reforms needed to advance high quality media experiences for vulnerable children. Today we're going to be talking about the term media mentor. We'll explain the importance of media mentors. We will also identify and discuss the skills that media mentors need and answer your questions you might have about this term and how it applies to your work. Before I turn it over to Chateau, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about TechSoup. TechSoup is headquartered here in San Francisco, California. And we'd like to know where you're joining us from. Why don't we go ahead and try out the chat box if everyone can chat in the city and state or country that you're joining us from. And while you do that, I'll talk to you a little bit more about TechSoup. We're a 501c3 nonprofit like many of you. We work to empower organizations around the world to get the latest tools, skills, and resources to help them achieve their mission. You can see from our map that we serve almost every country in the world. We do have a global website. So if you are joining us from another country, you can actually choose the country where you're joining from and you can access the website where there are product donations that are available to eligible nonprofits and libraries. Our impact, we've helped organizations get more than $5.2 billion in technology products and grants to NGOs around the world. And these tech products and grants come from more than 100 corporate and foundation partners. So we are going to turn this over to Chateau from the Early Learning Lab. And again, it's our privilege to be here today. Thank you so much for joining us and we hope you enjoy this program. Chateau? Thank you Susan. I love that question about where people are coming from. It's so exciting to see that we have people from Australia, from New Mexico, from I don't know, all over the country and other countries. So welcome everyone. As Susan said, I'm with the Early Learning Lab and we are based in Oakland, California. And we are very pleased to be working with TechSoup and other partners to bring you this webinar series on Early Learning and Technology. This is number two in our series of four webinars that we're producing for the field. And I'm absolutely thrilled to bring Chip and Michael and Lisa into this discussion and really learn about media mentorship and how we could support early literacy. So very briefly about the Early Learning Lab, as I said, we're based in Oakland. We're a young organization that's working to support the early childhood education field at large. We are doing this through the creation of aligned learning and innovation networks which really means that what we do is we bring different stakeholders together in a co-creation process to solve problems in the early childhood education field. So we work with school districts. We work with community-based organizations that are serving families. And we work with a range of organizations specifically around how technology can further the work that we're doing to support young children. But when we come to technology, we're really looking at three different levels. We're looking at the supply of tech products that are out there to support our work. We work with technologists to ensure that products are research-based and that they really meet the needs of the field and that the people who are working in the field are informing the design of technology. And we also work to help program implementers and families understand what's available and help them make smart decisions about what to use. And finally, we're huge proponents of research to practice. So this is what this webinar series is trying to get at, but bringing the latest in research in early learning and child development to people who are working with children and families on a day-to-day basis to make sure that we all have a shared understanding and that we're using the research and science to inform the way that we work with families and children. As part of the technology work that we're doing, again, the webinar trainings are a big part of it, but we're also trying to identify what we call those high-value design elements that are successful in the way that technology is used. We're also curating events and working to incubate new and improved technology solutions for the field. So that is just a brief overview of our organization. You can find out more by going to our website which is earlylearninglab.org. And with that, we're going to begin our show and I'm going to hand over the controls to Lisa. Great. Wonderful. Thanks so much, Chetal. And I know I speak on behalf of Chip and Michael, but I'm just saying thanks. We're really happy to be part of this, to be supporting the Early Learning Lab, and to be part of TechSoup's fantastic network. It's really, again, it was exciting to see so many people who are in the webinar with us right now, and we do want to make this an interactive experience for so many of you because I think that there are a lot of other experts out there. We certainly are not by any stretch the only ones. What we're going to do today is take you through some slides to kind of set up the concept of media mentors and mentorship, provide some context. And we also are going to be basing a lot of our conversation on two books that are one that is out and another that is on its way to being published. Michael Levine and I are the authors of TapClick Read, Growing Readers in a World of Screams, which was released last fall and the Enhanced eBook versions came out about a month ago. And Chip Donahue has edited a new volume that's in many ways kind of a companion to the other technology book that was referenced earlier in this family engagement in the digital age and will be coming this fall. I'm sure Chip will tell you a little bit more about that. We do really want to hear from all of you. So certainly in the questions on this webinar, but in general there are lots of ways through Twitter to stay connected I think in this field across early education, across the library world, across the public school system, across community engagement programs. So we hope you will follow along with us and join in the conversation. So we want to start by understanding our audience a little bit more and want to start with this poll. So if you could take a moment to answer this question, which of these words describes you? That would be tremendous stuff. So it will give us a sense of who we have with us. And I can see already that many responses are coming in and we're getting a good sense of who's there. I'll let this go a little bit longer so we can make sure that we are capturing everybody. It does appear that we have a lot of librarians. We'll see this in the results in one moment here as well as a lot of folks who put themselves in different categories. Several people who are in the research world as well. So I think I'll go ahead and skip to the results now we can see what that's starting to look like. It's really exciting actually to be on this. I'm thrilled to see this actually that there are a lot of librarians who are going to be part of this. And again we really are going to be eager to interact with you and hear your ideas. So given that I'm going to go ahead now to the next slide as well. In realizing as well Michael and Chip you probably see the same way that other category is very intriguing to me. And maybe in our question and answers we can learn a little bit more about how different people are labeling themselves where they would see themselves in this field. So the next question for all of us is whether you've ever heard of this concept of media mentors or media mentorship before coming to this webinar. And this will just give us a sense as well of whether we are starting new and fresh or whether this is something that many of you have already encountered. I'm sure there are lots of questions because there's lots of questions even in my mind about what the field needs to do to help define this term. Now I'm seeing those responses come in now as well and I'm going to skip to the results here too so you all can see what's arriving. It looks like about 45 to 46% of you haven't heard the term before which is totally understandable given that it's quite new. And it looks like we've got about 23% who identify, 23.5% who identify as a media mentor. So this is going to be really helpful for us as we move forward. All right, I'm going to move on and talk a little bit about why from our point of view we've been sensing a need for media mentorship. What problems are we really trying to solve? So there are a couple of statistics I wanted to kind of put in front of us here. One is that we've seen from surveys that early educators, those who define themselves as preschool teachers, K-3 teachers, those who are caregivers in the third grade space that they are feeling a need for more support and guidance. There was a poll from NAAC, the National Association for the Education of Young Children done with Northwestern and the Fred Rogers Center a couple of years ago that showed that more than one-third of respondents had said that they did not receive enough technical support and the majority of respondents said that they had not, about 57%, so they were receiving professional development and technology only once a year or even less than that. So we certainly see that there's a hunger out there and there's a need to be filled. Another statistic that's important is to recognize that a lot of families' parents are looking around trying to find some guidance on these issues. When is media useful to their children? When is it not? There are a majority of parents who really see media as an educational, particularly as they define it, educational media as a positive force on their children's lives, and that's from a learning at home survey that the CUNY Center put out over two years ago now. And then we also have statistics, I'm going to move us to this next slide that show that children themselves are, maybe they're not necessarily answering questions about how media fits in their life, but they are, of course, being tested on a variety of different literacy measures and from what we see in the national statistics on children's ability to understand what they read and comprehend at a proficient level what they read, we're seeing that more than two-thirds of fourth graders are unable to hit that mark of proficiency that they're struggling with the materials that are put in front of them. We've called this in the Tap Click Readbook, The Quiet Crisis. Given that, we are also seeing, and I think we all recognize that there's a need to put these issues in context, not just in schools, not just in libraries, but across various settings from birth up through elementary school. And there's a report that New America put out last fall that I'm showing you here on the screen from crawling to walking, which is looking at states and state policies in the birth through third grade realm, looking at a whole host of different policies that relate to language development and literacy in particular, and shows that many states are really struggling as we put it, they're toddling to kind of get up to speed. Some are crawling. If you are walking, no state is running. There are a lot of policies that we have to, certainly in New America's mind, that really need to be fixed and improved upon. But within that context, we're also recognizing that children need those family engagement supports. They also need educators around them, and this includes librarians and parents to start to understand. I really do think librarians especially didn't absolutely get this, but understand that literacy is not just about decoding words on a page. That learning to read requires a two-pronged approach, and learning to be a literate human being really requires this approach. And it's an approach that helps children develop their skills, and that certainly does include decoding, but a lot of other skills around oral language, and also gives them a knowledge base. It helps to develop their background knowledge so they can understand the world around them. We've also noticed in some more context here that there is a huge explosion of educational apps out there that we're all trying to kind of understand better. We put the words educational in quotes in this particular slide because we are recognizing that there are a lot of questions about what is really educational and what isn't, and Michael will go into that a little bit more later in our remarks. The field of early education though has really been responding to this question for parents in many ways. Over the past several years we have had things like the release of Take a Giant Step, which is a paper on teacher preparation that the Community Center was highly involved in. The National Association for the Education of Young Children and the Fred Rogers Center have put out a position statement on technology in early childhood and in early education settings. And this other piece that you see in front of you here with the blue bar titled Using Screen Media with Young Children is part of a suite of documents that the organization Zero to Three has put out. They have a whole suite of materials called ScreenSense that are research based pieces of guidance for those who work with very young children. And lastly we are recognizing, or almost like not quite last, but almost lastly we're recognizing that it's not just that people have concerns about the amount of time. We can certainly talk about the amount of time that children might be using media, but they're also wondering about how it's used and who's with children when they're using it. I often and many other colleagues often talk about the three C's, which are the importance of the content, the importance of the context, and the importance of the individual child in recognizing how today's kids learn from the media around them. And well-designed content and the importance of contact somebody with children, helping them to learn, understand those are critical components and feed into this media mentorship concept. And lastly, this is the one piece I wanted to reference for those who may not know about this. The American Academy of Pediatrics has signaled that they are planning to revise their guidelines on how screen media is used with young children. And so on screen here you see just a snapshot of a really fantastic report that they published in October of last year. And there's a lot more to come from the AAP on this, but in short they are focused on content and context as well. So now I will shift us to another poll and hopefully we can get a good sense of how we're all feeling given that context, how we're feeling about some of these issues. So if you can answer this one, how are you feeling about the capabilities of today's professionals to assist families as they navigate the digital age? It would be great to get your take on this. We have everything from very optimistic to very pessimistic here. And I think as I skip the results we'll see them come across the screen as you are feeling in your polls. And this is really great to see. It's super interesting because I also think about myself and how I would answer a poll like this. And sometimes it depends on the day, what you've actually encountered in your library or with the children that you're working with. But right now we have about 47 to 48% of folks saying that they're cautiously optimistic. So this is a group that seems to understand that there may be some promise out there, but perhaps we have to be really mindful about what's ahead. So I'll move it now to our next slide and I'm going to turn it over to Michael Levine. I'll be still controlling it so Michael feel free to tell me when you need me to move. But Michael is going to go ahead and provide a little bit more information from our book. Thanks so much Lisa and hello everybody. It's my pleasure to be with you. And so great to see friends and colleagues and folks from across the world joining us. So the movement in the field which we just saw reflected I think in the poll and also in recent remarks is very encouraging because our research leads us to one simple conclusion which I think many of you may have come to as well. You just have to take a modern approach and that includes activating media savvy mentors who are informed by the best research and practices. We've been trying to do our part as Lisa mentioned for the past several years. We've been sifting through research on digital media, taking a really close look at the app stores and learning from initiatives across the country. We've been trying to identify and interview our leaders in those initiatives to help create a vision of what this modern approach might look like. And as we're starting to find some really interesting exemplars we realize that it often becomes a little bit easier to show than to tell. So on the topclicklead.org website you can get access to the interactive features of the book, the videos that we've created. To be able to show you, Susan, we want to be able to show one video now on a great program for migraine families in rural Maine. So let's take a look if this will work. Great. Bear with me one moment while I queue it up. Thank you. There are a lot of people in this area, mostly because they came here as migrant workers originally to work and harvest blueberries in the month of August. As families started to settle in this area, the school system has tried to be responsive but a lot of times they're not aware of what issues non-English-speaking families are facing. Mianza en Casa, it starts at home, is a program that we started in the spring of 2012. And the goal of the program is to provide parents with the tools and information that they need to help their child prepare for kindergarten. Cualquier de los apps, cuando quieras es... We help parents load an iPad with different educational apps. And what we do is we create units that focus on just a couple of early learning concepts. And then the parents will take home the iPad and be able to explore those concepts in different ways. What color is it? We have pink. What color are you choosing? Orange. Six oranges. Jayden wasn't really, he didn't really want to read or write or like do a lot of like... I didn't really know what to teach him. So, and ideas that like the videos and the apps and it gives us like a lot of ideas like to get you thinking of what he needs to learn to get ready for kindergarten. What color are you looking for? Wow, where's the blue dot? You see it? Huh? You found it. It's a wonderful tool using iPads with students that are English language learners. For example, it's very visual. It's very exciting. They really are enjoying hearing those digital stories with the music, with the sound. I don't know how it's happening, but they're more engaged. I see more engagement. Can I sign something? What is it? Can you take it? We definitely emphasize doing off-screen activities as well. So they're taking pictures with it. They're recording videos. Yes, there are apps that are for playing, but they also connect to things that they're doing every day that, you know, there's definitely a balance of education being part of everyday life, which isn't always on a screen, hopefully. Enjoy. A lot of the migrant families that we work with have been really disempowered by the different systems that they have to engage with. The program itself has helped me get more confident as a parent to know what to teach him, how to prepare him to school and know what he needs to learn. It's really scary. And just having that iPad and having those apps that relate to a concept that you want to teach, it does help a parent. It shows them where to go. And it's just taking that first step, using that iPad for that journey of exploration and education with their child. We focus on working with parents because they're the ones who are going to be there throughout their child's educational experience. As a teacher, I can tell pretty quickly in my kid of our classrooms, the students that have parents that are actively engaged, those children that come to school, they want to learn. They're on fire, and those are the types of things that you see when you do have that strong parent engagement. So to tell you that some of the technical difficulties that some of you may have experienced, if you want to see it, you of course can go to YouTube, but you can also go to TapQuickRead.org. And you'll note that they're really important mentoring adults who are featured in each of the videos, teachers, parents, librarians, community activists, home visitors and so on. So thanks. Next one. So I hope that that gave you a sense of at least how one community is taking a different approach to how technology can be used. I've been very influenced. This chart shows you it's not my dissertation. It's a chart that actually takes into account the work of my mentor, Yuri Bromperm-Benner, and what he calls ecological systems theory. I won't get into all the details, but basically children's learning and development depends on, as most of you know from your work, a predictable but complex web of human relationships that begin in infancy. Yuri Bromperm-Benner described the family as a micro system, a place where a wonderful ping-pong match or today's languages serve and return is going on between the highly responsible caring adult and a child who he or she is hopefully crazy about. So over time, of course, the child moves out of the home to establish important relationships with a web of adults and peers in different settings, such as schools, libraries, and neighborhood centers. So in short, the theory asserts, and this is not a political statement, but it does take a village to help a child get a good start. So an important element of our research here at the Cane Center focuses on the potential of what experts, and we've been calling joint media engagement or how our families and children learning together, experiencing media together. One interesting area which I think is right for more research is how children might learn content knowledge. That knowledge piece we described is one of the two columns that we introduced a bit earlier by watching media together with their parents or siblings or interacting in new ways with rich content that sparks their curiosity. How can we reinvent the family hour to help kids want to learn more about that topic, something they're passionate about? Next one. So we see the potential in using technology, but in service of learning as an assist to what's going on inside the classroom or inside the learning, within the library, the learning environment. If we're going to create an ecosystem of learning around children, we can't rely on the marketplace alone. Here are a few facts from the recent analysis we described in tab click read. One concern we've had all along is that this booming apps marketplace, which Lucid described, is not doing nearly enough to support community programs and their educational mission. So our teams are really digging into what's in the app stores in terms of early literacy learning. What we found is definitely cause for concern. This report, which was released about five or six months ago, goes into great detail about what we found. It's called Getting a Read on the App Stores. So here's a bit about the analysis of that report, and we have ongoing analyses underway as well, which we can talk about in the Q&A. First, we want to know who the developers are, who are creating literacy apps, who are creating literacy apps for us, pardon me. No surprise here. I just commonly mention audience for kids in the pre-school three to five age range, followed by kids in elementary school and babies and toddlers. I should say that these categories are not mutually exclusive. I think the lab may have mentioned zero to two and three to five. A really important goal of our scan was to document and determine which language and literacy skills were being targeted by developers. We consulted curriculum experts and research and literacy development, and came up with nearly two dozen different skills so forth. This chart displays the eight that were mentioned by at least ten different apps in our analysis. We're seeing an abundance of fairly basic skills, which won't surprise you. This corresponds to the predominant focus on the pre-school age, you know, audience of skills and the politics that they need to master. But we did know that reading comprehension, which is typically considered a higher order skill, is now on the left, and this is actually movement from the last time that we did study, and that vocabulary development is beginning to get some very well-deserved attention from developers with popular apps. This is a very positive sign. Here's the finding that surprised us. I'm sorry that slide somehow doesn't array that well in this particular format. But when we were first coming up with our sampling, we were interested in whether the apps that won accolades from the expert review sites would tend to be the same apps that show up in the most popular list. It turns out the answer is really no, mostly no. In fact, over eight in ten, 83% of the apps that were included in our sample because they won awards from expert review sites were not among the top 50 lists for paid in three apps. Next one. Almost none of the apps in our sample were designed for that co-play, for that joint media engagement experience, meaning mom and dad playing with a child together or even sharing information with adults after the fact. Remember though that our scan was actually over a year and a year and a half ago now, and things may be changing on this front. And anecdotally, I can say, and I think Lisa would agree that we've been pitched by many more companies with apps that have a co-play or a co-use centerpiece. I especially like the work of a really wonderful app by the name of TuneTastic. And just in the last couple of months, we've gotten wind of a really lovely new one called HangArt, an app that's like HangMan that uses even more graphical options for kids to play with together. Next one. So that's just a taste of our findings from the apps analysis. Let's turn to what we know about eBooks and their effectiveness. This is something that many of the librarians who are on the call today are very, very well aware of the transitions that are underway from print to digital within library systems. There's a ton to learn here. One study that we detail in the book showed that very young children could get something out of interactive content on the touchscreen if the place that a child was touching, if the invitation to click or tap was associated with a specific word that child was being taught. But just indiscriminate tapping does nothing for them. Our own research here at the Community Center also shows that some of the hotspots that exist within enhanced books are at distraction from early literacy learning. We know from many studies that adult child interaction still really matters and plays an important role in helping children learn. Some key learning moments occur in the questions and answers really important ping-pong match, the conversation that happens between adults and children about the content of the reading together. And of course, the design of a book can trigger those great individual conversations or can cut them off. Some of the most interesting studies that we detail in Tap Click Read are ones that show the significance of both good design and the power of course of that parent or that caregiver being fully engaged. In the most recent issue of Young Children, which is a publication that may see, we write about the latest science on e-books and how they affect interaction. One really interesting study in Israel shows that the most optimal situation is a well-designed e-book coupled with an interactive reading partner sitting with the child. In that study, what I mentioned before, a well-designed e-book led the adult reader to ask deeper questions than the adults who use the printed book, which then led to richer interactions, of course, with the child. So I guess I would say in some the mounting districts on the importance of interactions, not a shock to most of you who work with parents and children every day, is really, really important in anything that we think about vis-a-vis technology. We need to think about technology not so much as a productivity driver or as an engagement driver, although those are all possibilities and we need to think about them as a relationship driver. So in real programs that are powered by real relationships in Head Start centers, elementary school classrooms, home business programs, libraries, and others, we just need to take a look at relationships being at the center. In fact, many of these relationship-oriented, tech-assist, more robust, you know, educational content built into them programs are underway around the country. You see here on this map an interactive feature of our integrating technology and our literacy platform is that you can take a look at some almost three dozen programs that we've plotted on this map. And later this summer, and those of you who are interested in knowing more about this, we can talk about it offline, we're pulling together an institute to help connect leaders in many communities of researchers, policymakers, and innovators to make sure that everyone learns from each other about what's working well and what is not. So let's take your pulse a little bit with this quick poll. Are you part of a project or initiative that involves training programs, training parents or educators about the best use of media and technology with young children? We're seeing the primacy of the library professionals who are here today, which is great. And if folks are not finding this category satisfactory, just put a note in the chat window. Maybe some folks are from industry or from research doing interesting experimentation or design in this area. Very interesting. So about a third of those being pulled or are not involved and it looks like just about half are involved in a public library, nonprofit or public school about one in seven are elsewhere. So this is a good segue to introduce Chip to talk a bit about what we have foreshadowed, the importance of some of these relationship drivers, what we're calling media mentors. Chip Donahue. And this is Lisa. Yeah, Chip, you got it? It's happy to take a pause, too, to... Oh, I'm sorry. I was wanting to just reply that. I can introduce. I mean, we've been tracking, and many of you on the phone, the Association of Library Services to Children have been looking directly at public libraries in their approach. Lisa, you want to show the white paper? Yes, sure. I'll go ahead and show the film. Yeah. So this white paper, which was published, what about a little bit over a year and a quarter ago, has a real interesting call to action for children and youth librarians and was, you know, adopted by the ALCS, the ALSC's Executive Board. And it, I think, stimulates a lot of the activity in getting libraries and librarians to equip their staff to, you know, model what it means to be a media mentor and defining the art form such as it is. And now I think I will turn it over to Chip. Maybe I'll just jump in with one quick comment on that, Michael, before. Yeah. Chip is on too. That various librarians who are in this webinar with us might know about. There are several librarian leaders, Ken Campbell, Claudia Haynes, Dorothy Stoltz, many of the people who were part of the writing of this particular piece, Amy Costner, who are really working hard to think more deeply about what media mentorship means within children's library services in particular. And there will be a new book coming out in addition to the one that Chip's editing that Ken Campbell and Claudia Haynes have been working on that also relates to some of the issues of media mentorship, very particular to libraries. So I just wanted to give a shout out to that. I'm really excited about that book coming as well and there will be a lot of opportunity for a richer discussion once we have those materials too. And Lisa and Michael, is this a good time to take a couple of questions? Yeah, sure. It sounds like we've got a little bit of time. It might be a nice moment to pause a bit and hear what people are asking. Yeah. We did have a question about how to evaluate apps. Is there some objective form or rubric or tool that folks can access and use for that? Yeah, so I'll take that and then Lisa may want to offer comments on it as well. In the book we do this, and you can give this without the book on the website, that quick read, a number of different research-informed resources that are doing apps analysis and apps rating. For example, there's a great site that Common Sense Media runs for educators, which is called Graphite. There's very, very strong work being done by Warren Buckleidner and his colleagues for the Children's Technology Review, and I'm also a fan of the site teachers with apps, but there are other really good rating organizations by far west, another one, that you can find in the book. As a media, for sure. Yeah. And I was going to just piggyback on that and a little bit later in this, we'll show you a screenshot of where you can find some lists that we've put together for various educators, family engagement specialists, those who want to get a better handle on who the app reviewers are and what criteria they're using when they're determining what apps should be in their suite of resources. You can find that at TapClickRead.org slash Take Action. I'll show you that in a little bit here. There's also, I think, there's broader questions. It begs the kind of broader question that I think many people are trying to kind of grapple with, which is the need for curation and better understanding of the materials that are out there, because it's certainly not just books anymore and not even really just kind of DVDs and whether to put DVDs on a shelf. There are other questions out there about to what extent you help parents find other kinds of digital materials to use with their children. So that's about materials, but one of the things we're seeing as we look around the country at what's really working, we're seeing that it helps to have the materials coupled with really deep relationship-building programs, and that's why we described that earlier and showed and plotted on the map. There's a lot of places whether they're embedded in library programs or in Head Start or in home visiting programs where they're there. They're not just relying on the materials. They're recognizing that they have a role to play in modeling, whether it's through story times, modeling, based on even just the questions asked in the way. We talk about the way media is used with children, and that's really a nascent new area that is part of this media mentorship idea. So if they're academics or folks are really interested in strategies that scholars are using to understand how literacy-oriented apps or books are being developed, the work of Kathy Hirsch-Passek and her colleague, Roberta Gollenkoff, who they set Temple University and University of Delaware, respectively, is very, very interesting and important to understand. They are very interested in rating the apps around literacy development and then Roberta Colotta at University of Utah, Utah State, or University of Utah is also doing very, very interesting. Yeah, actually, I think she might be with Brigham Young. Brigham Young University, so sorry, yeah, doing very, very important work in this area as well. Great, and we can probably include those references and resources in the follow-up email that we'll send out in a couple of days. Right? Yeah, there was another question. Actually, it was a comment from Amanda that it would be nice to have like a resource room or a joint place where all of the professionals on this webinar and elsewhere could share good and bad finds that they experience in their workplace. Perhaps. That's a really great idea. I mean, we certainly are seeing the need. People want to network. They want to share stories. They're horror stories or exciting stories, right? About what's working and what's not. And one of the reasons we're doing this summer institute that Michael mentioned, that again, we're happy to follow up with you, Luan, is that we see a need for people to kind of get together and hear stories about how they're trying to use media in new ways. But this is across everything from, you know, community organizations, mayor's offices to school districts to, of course, libraries as well. Is there a place right now where people do this? That's a really good question. Maybe others who are on this webinar can point to forums or associations that are, have moments, special interest group sessions where this kind of conversation can flourish. We do have a few coming into the chat that we can reach out to everyone. It looks like a couple of people storytimeunderground.org. I think anyone got to go. Thank you. Another comment or suggestion from Laurie is there are ways to get for-profit companies like Apple to highlight apps that are rated by those particular agencies that you've discussed as highly effective. So kind of an advocacy from the for-profit industry. Yeah, I'll take that for a second. It's a great question that we get asked all the time. We do have folks who we have been working with at Apple to, as well as at Google and other, you know, platforms that are trying to array, you know, more research-informed, you know, apps and, you know, books for kids within their existing platforms. But we have to remember that these are organizations that are thinking about profit first and impact second often. We're very interested in working here at the Community Center with other groups whose mission is directly to share the good stuff. And so there is an experimental project right now underway. I don't know how many of the folks who are logged in here know about First Book, but we will talk a little bit about First Book a bit later. We're looking to partner with this platform that has over 275,000 members who are reaching several million low-income families and children around the United States to share the research, but also possibly to be able to make a distribution effort to get the good stuff flowing in the direction of the families who need that the most. Great. Those were the questions we had in the queue right now, Michael and Lisa. So I think perhaps we are ready for CHIP. That's great. And there's lots and lots of really good resources being shared from now on. Yeah, that's exciting. I love from ALSB, and it's really, really good to have this interaction with the community that have generously went their time here today. So, CHIP, take it away. CHIP, you may... We're having a little bit of difficulty. Could CHIP be on mute? Can you hear me? Yes. Now we can hear you. Perfect. Okay. Sorry. Not sure what happened there. You know, we shouldn't expect that people who work in technology have any idea how they can do that today. So thank you, Michael and Lisa, for giving us to this point, and thank you for inviting me to jump in at this point to talk about the new book which Michael and Lisa contributed to Family Engagement in the Digital Age, Early Childhood Educators as Media Mentors. And it's really the intersection of those two ideas that I think makes the book unique when we started. One of the joys of being an editor of a volume like this is you get to invite thought leaders and friends to contribute. But when I did that, I talked about Family Engagement in the Digital Age and what do we know? What's working? What's innovative? How are we using technology to connect more effectively with families? But then I tagged on this notion of media mentors and everybody here kind of struggled a little bit with what does that really mean and how is it relevant to the work I'm doing. I got to tell you that what people came back with is so inspiring and so exciting. And as we've said already, this idea actually began with Lisa writing this phrase in an interview or an article in the library world ticket and ran. We're not wanting to take it and run. We're wanting to actually enrich it or expand it a little bit and think about who else are media mentors and how do we prepare them in the same ways that we've been reflecting on librarians. So that's the intent. I'm going to use the frame of Family Engagement in the Digital Age to make that case and to point you to some ways in which technology is in fact helping families to connect differently in a more quality way. I love this quote from Fred Rogers. Strengthen a parent and you strengthen a child. To me, that's the rationale for parent involvement and communication and engagement, right? We work with the parents so that we can in fact improve outcomes for children. And the modern version of Family Engagement, we're wanting to improve family well-being and everybody in the conversation to get stronger. But that notion of strengthening a parent I think is really embedded in my own philosophy. We talk about parent empowerment. We talk about engaging families. It's not about telling families what to do or telling parents how to use media or even which often happens in the media right now telling parents they're not being great parents because of the way they're using media. It's around tapping into what they know about their own children and what they care deeply about about their family and then connecting them to thoughts about how to use media well. So that I want you to have that frame as I go on. It's really about empowerment and that family engagement is a two-way reciprocal relationship. This is not something we do to families. This is something we do with families. And then Ellen Golinski and others have created this environment called Room and I love the very first words that a parent can sign up here. You already have what it takes. What wonderful affirmation, what wonderful encouragement, what wonderful gentle nudges, right? So if you already have what it takes, what we're doing is honoring what you know right now and we're going to build from there. What a different message then where you have no idea what you're doing and we're going to tell you how it works. I think that's just so empowering. I think all of us have been, Michael at least I've all been at presentations where Ellen's shown some video around people seeing that message for the first time and it is really moving and really powerful. So you got it. You know what I'm trying to say here. This is about how we really can connect with families in new ways. So the idea is can we intentionally use technology to reach some of what have always been the goals of families? Can we improve communication between parents and teachers? Can we strengthen that home-school communication and make that more of a two-way relationship? Not just what we push to home but what comes back from home. Can in fact knowing more about what's going on in the home really help educators to enhance what they do? Can we start to build community in our schools and our programs and our libraries and our children's museums where we gather families and young children? Can we really create that sense of community and connect with the communities in which we're in? I'm going to just pause for this moment and say those of us who contributed to this book actually think the answer to all of these things who are resounding yes. But we've got to pay attention to how we get there and that's part of what we were looking for and part of what Michael and Lisa found in their Intel work and there's certainly overlap between the early literacy best practices and innovations that they were finding and some of what came back around around family engagement. We want to encourage parent-to-parent sharing. Somebody asked earlier, is there a way we could all as educators share what we like and don't like with each other? Absolutely, we need to do that. We need to be connected learners and we need to create that community. But how powerful is it for parents to have the opportunity to share with other parents what they like and don't like and what's working and isn't working and to become a media mentor for other parents because they have an idea about how to use an app or how to use one of the things that's on their phone or their iPad in new ways. Can we increase parent and caregiver involvement and we're coming up to the gold standard here. What we really want to know is how do we get parents or caregivers more involved, more meaningfully involved, more involved over the long term, more involved because they want to be involved and engaged, not because we say to them this is a critical thing. Can we enhance family engagement? Can we empower parents and families? I've already told you, we absolutely believe those last two are what this is all about. While we are wildly enthusiastic about technology when it works well, the three of us on this call and other folks in this space, we're child development people. We're not technologists. We care deeply about the healthy development of young children and the well-being of families. What we're curious about is can these new devices that are in people can, smartphones and other things, can they in fact be tools to do better what we've always been trying to do? And we're starting to get some evidence that the answer can be yes. When we think about family engagement and we think about technology, there are some things we have to be mindful of. We have to be aware of barriers to access and Michael and Lisa, and I hope my own work as well, we've been saying all along if these devices turn out to be beneficial and lead to better outcomes for children, then they have to lead to better outcomes for children, not just some children, not just children and families who can afford the device. We've got to really think about equity and access here. I think it's an interesting irony that at a time when we have new tools that could help us address equity and access in new ways, they might in fact make it worse. They might in fact widen the gap and we're not careful. So be very mindful of that and think about that. We need to meet the parents where they are five years ago. Where they are today might be on Twitter, where they are today might be on Facebook, where they are today might be that they really like to chat and get messages that way. We need to figure out what compels them, what excites them, and what ways do they like to get information and share information. As we do with young children, we need to think about multiple pathways. So we can't have one solution and one of the things I worry the most about is that we get wildly excited about our technology and then forget that the message in the lunch box actually has worked pretty well for a long time where the message on the bulletin board right by the door as parents come has actually been effective. And for some families, maybe the only way they can access that information. So we really need to think about that. This next one I think is really fun to think about. There's some work being done around behavioral nudges and, of course, intersects directly with projects that are using text messages to send an idea or ask your child this question or hear something you can do. That notion of providing a nudge at the right time, just at the right time when a parent is curious about something or needs support and needs a resource. This is a powerful idea and there's a wonderful chapter in the book by our colleagues from the RAND Institute about how this big idea about behavioral nudges fits so nicely into the way we think of relationships-based interactions with families. And so nudges can be empowering or nudges can convince you that you don't know what you're doing. I think you already know which side of that we all come out on. Michael and Lisa talked in the final chapter of the book about finding new allies and I think that's such an important part of this story. I'm going to list some of those new allies from my perspective in a minute but I want to circle back to what I said earlier. It's grown up out of the library world. One of the great joys of my work over the last three or four years has been the sudden intersection of children's librarians and children's museum staff and early childhood educators around this question of digital media and how do we use it well. So I think this does open up opportunities for new allies and for finding new people to bring into the conversation and to learn with them from new folks with different perspectives. I think about why won't we always talk with the librarian because this will share a great conversation and we've got a lot to learn from each other so I'm not going to beat us up for what we haven't been doing. I'm going to really celebrate the moment that we have where librarians and educators and others in formal and informal settings are in fact seeking each other out, are looking for ways to learn from each other are in fact becoming media mentors for each other at a professional level and what we hear is that we want to be media mentors to parents so they can be media mentors to their children. Think back to the video that Michael showed about and all the mentoring that was going on and the mentoring that was going on to the parent so that the parent could then mentor to the child. That's it. That's what we're really talking about and ultimately parents who can make these choices and feel confident and confident about doing so or moving toward that level of empowerment that we're all very excited about. So what works? Can we push and pull? I think I mentioned earlier that family engagement has got to be a two-way street. It's not just what we push at parents. It's got to be what we get back from them as well and that we act on what we get back from them. I'm watching with one eye the back channel flowing along down the left-hand side of the screen and you know what folks? There we go. That's it. That's connected learning. That's what we're talking about. Talk to each other. Share ideas. Throw a link up there. Say to somebody, here's what works for me or here's what doesn't. This is really powerful. This is a digital age way for us to enhance our teaching and our learning and our parenting. That's what we're excited about. So we've seen some examples of email campaigns and social media use that are starting to work. Lots of activity in the work Michael and Lisa surfaced around using text messages to promote early literacy or other aspects of child development. Ready Rosie out of Texas is doing this amazing project where they send links to really authentic short video clips of parents parenting well and teachers teaching well to parents regularly so they can take a look and see what it looks like to do it well. I talked before about just in time learning which is an idea that really comes here out of industrial training but it's that notion of if you teach me just what I need to learn just what I need to learn it. I am so much more likely to in fact use it, do it well, remember it, and share it with others. So there's the sweet spot. It's not a one-off text message. It's something that leads to real behavior change over time. Can we customize tips based on the age of the child development, based on culture and language and all the other ways in which families are diverse and again the technology allows us to not send just one message to everybody but to send the right message to folks that really can support them. Can we send messages that are empowering? I said earlier one of the things that we've been scanning at the Tech Center at Erickson is just the headline scan and I'm doing a presentation for parents on Saturday. So in the last two weeks I set the clock for two weeks to just look for headlines in the media around screen time. There's always plenty but 90% of them are negative. 90% of them express fear or encourage parents to be afraid of what's going on instead of empowering them to make wise decisions. So we've got to watch out for those messages and we've got to combat some of that. Talk about nudges already and we're going to see, again I think of a nudge as a deeper dive into this notion of text messaging or just in time learning. Can we send parenting tips and digital skills? Can we in fact improve the way parents are using digital media as we get them to use digital media? Well, there's come answer in process. One parent said, I've had before and now she feels really confident and confident about using that iPad. I love the idea of tools to figure out how to use the tools. If parents have smartphones and let's figure out how to get them using smartphones to connect with us and share ideas. And then I said earlier about access and equity and the digital use divide and the three of us again were at a symposium at the Department of Education Health in the spring and this kind of phrase digital use divide caught my attention because we've been saying digital lives for a long time but what we're starting to see is that even when there are devices present in homes, they're being used very differently or the child's access to it as a tool for learning is very different in one home and another and we really got to pay attention to that as well. So what I've got on the screen now is just a handful of places. Take a look, write some of these down, click your way through them. When the book comes out, take a look at longer descriptions that we've got Michael and Lisa, if you want to unmute after I talk about this and talk about the overlap between what you found and what we found out, I'd be thrilled to have you do that. So coming into right off the bat is one that Michael just showed you and that all of us who are doing this work point to as an amazing example of mentoring that leads to power and parent empowerment. Ready Rosie, I mentioned before video clips, Ready 4K is a program out of Stanford University or USC that's really trying to match messages around early learning and school readiness for parents, text for baby, coming out of zero to three and other parts of the text goes home is a great example of helping parents learn tech to use how to learn tech. Fantastic idea. Too small to fail is a national effort that uses email and website and other social media ways to really get empowering and positive messages out and then room I mentioned before. Michael and Lisa any comments here about any of these about what else you've seen? I would just say that this is a bunch of overlap here and without spending too much time that Atlas interactive map will soon link out again has descriptions not only of what the program mix is in many of these instances but also what's the underlying evaluation research that is stimulating the growth of the program where is the program getting support from who's the population based in the setting and so on. So that is an organic evolving map and track that we're doing of these sorts of programs and we would absolutely value candidates from all of you that you think that we should be taking a closer look at. And I'll just add one of the things that I think the field still needs to do I mean it's a question on my mind and comes up as we talk about some of these examples that are surfacing this really interesting one is that it may become time to start categorizing and classifying a little bit and understanding what makes the most sense in which context. So for example some of the the cases you see up here say like Ready 4K or Text for Baby which are using text messaging to reach parents they are really outreach mechanisms they're using technology in a way to engage parents in new ways so that those parents then feel empowered in that moment to oh yeah there is this really cool activity I can do with my child or yeah let's have a fun gaming flash playful conversation about this word. But that's different from a media mentor program that may involve say librarians at a public library who are holding a story time to really model what it looks like to use an e-book with children in ways that doesn't completely vacate the adults role and instead shows how parents can still play an integral role in talking with their kids pointing at things that they are seeing in the book or on the screen connecting them to what they are experiencing with a Ben walking to the library that morning or being at the bus stop. And that's about using media moments to enrich conversation in a way that's about joint media engagement media as a springboard for a conversation about that particular piece of content at that moment. So there's a lot of different I think there we haven't figured out all the parameters on this I think the library community is going to be a huge leader on this and helping us understand what these kinds of roles are and which ones work best in which context. Good. Thanks Michael. So I said earlier that I was going to show you an incomplete list of where I'm thinking of and finding media mentors. So just take a look at what's on the screen you can see you get the idea that I'm casting it a bit broader and that the co-authors and the book have done the same but the rich idea of media mentorship can play out differently. I agree with Lisa we need to look at context works and what makes sense but it also raises issues of what do all these media mentors need to know to be media mentors and what are the messages that they can share but that idea that there are new allies to play with now and again that Michael we see right about so wonderfully in the book is just a reminder that there are a lot of folks who intersect around child development and early learning and working with parents and families and maybe we need to think about to the advantage of some of those intersections. Somebody just leave you with a couple of quotes that I think are worth I'm not a big fan of reading on the screen but I think sometimes you got to hear words and not just see them so let me share this one from Lisa. Today's young children who are using technology to learn and create while working with adults who can set good examples and guide them to new heights are receiving tremendous advantages if only the privileged few have the opportunity for that kind of tech but human powered learning divides will only grow wider a point that I made earlier and this is from an early essay that Lisa has contributed to this book as well. Friends at Harvard Family Research Project said that digital media can be used not only to provide families with information but also to increase their understanding to use that information effectively and creatively. By doing so families take on the roles of lifelong educators and learners. They become powerful teachers for their own children who also gain new skills themselves. From the report that we started with earlier as well, media mentors actively engage with children and families interacting with digital media provided within the library context both guiding children through positive and efficient use of the technology and modeling for caregivers how they can support their children's digital literacy development outside of the library. And again, big ideas here. And then I've been promoting Michael and Lisa's chapter so I've got a quote of it as well. Now it is the time to both upgrade the skills of these professionals and envision new professional roles to help families understand and become savvy users of the digital media and interactive communication tools that are parts of children's nested environments. And so I'm giving those to the last word on my part of this and I'll hand it back to them. Lisa? Okay, great. Yeah. Thank you so much, Chip. It's always been strange to see your quote. Thank you very much for that. One quick note before we go on to this next slide. The other thing I was thinking about, and I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this when we talk about categorizing and classifying and understanding what these roles are. There's also the really important role of being a critical thinker of the media that's coming at kids and coming at parents, and not all of it's great, right? And librarians especially, but also various early childhood teachers have a pretty good sense of what's kind of schlocky and not so great for kids or families and what is actually really rich and beautiful to engage with. And so helping... You can quote her on schlocky. That's what's got to be on the slide next time, Chip. It's not all great out there, right? So we need these media mentors to help us. And I'm saying this now as a parent who had to navigate this stuff and half the time really fell into some holes to really help us make some good choices. So let me take a moment quickly here to show you a couple of things that we are making available on our topclickread.org website. These are free. And available to anybody who finds them useful. We're at the very beginning of launching these resources. And we're really eager for feedback. So if you go to topclickread.org you see that of course we have those videos. You'll see a few of them in this screenshot here. And some more information about events and app reviewers. But we also recently have created a space, and I mentioned this earlier, where you can download tip sheets that can help you as an educator or as an early literacy specialist. Maybe take a moment to think a little bit more about what you want to focus on. Perhaps talk about these issues with professional learning communities. Perhaps print them out and bring them to parent workshops. And we wanted to show you what these are and where you can find them. So at topclickread.org there's a take action button at the top or a tab. And once you go there you get to this page that is where you can see the headline, Create Ecosystems for Early Learning and Literacy. That's really what we're trying to promote with this media mentorship idea. And by clicking on the first red tab in your classroom and school, you get to a series of one and two page documents that provide helpful tips and resources. If you click on the middle one in your home and with families you get to a set of resources. And many of them are similar to what you might use in school settings, but there are some different ones as well. I'll just point out a few of them that are noted here. We created a page that synthesizes research on how dual language learners may be able to really benefit from different media engagement moments. And so we have a tip sheet called How to Use Media to Support Children's Home Language. And the idea there is to it's twofold. It's to promote the idea that the language that children speak at home are really important and it's okay that it's not English at first. In fact that could be a really asset for children in the future in terms of their growth learners, but that parents may need encouragement to use their own language at home because I hear so many messages about English being the only thing that their children need. When in fact we're seeing that bilingualism or even trilingualism could be a huge asset to those children. So there's some ideas on this two-pager of how to help families with that. We also have this page called How to Find Apps for Literacy Learning that on the right side lists many of those app reviewers that we've talked about during this webinar. And on the back side shows some of those tips from Barbara Colada who Michael mentioned earlier and from librarians who have put together some rubrics that are incredibly valuable for doing a deeper evaluation of which apps make sense for which learners. And then the other tab that we have on this page is the In Your Community Manager. Right now we have two resources available. We're going to have many more in the coming months. And they're really to help guide advocacy organizations, policy leaders, community activists, community organization directors, mayors to start thinking about these ideas more holistically and recognize the connections between literacy and kind of digital age equity. So we just wanted to point those out because we're hoping to have maybe a suite of materials that today's media mentors, those who are starting to maybe see themselves in this role, that these materials can be the beginning of a toolkit that various educators and media mentors can use. And lastly I wanted to note that First Book has been a great partner with us on this. And if you go if you know of First Book as Michael described earlier, an organization that's working with schools around the country and other school organizations to provide books very affordable, low cost books and sometimes often free materials. We're working with them to disseminate our tips and resources and to build out their digital learning hub which you can find at the First Book Marketplace if you just put First Book Marketplace into Google, you'll find that digital learning hub. So that is the end of our slide presentation. We're eager to hear feedback and questions and I should, before I turn it all the way over to our audience, just double check with Michael and Chip to make sure there's not something that I missed that you all would want to add in. I think that's great. We have 10 minutes. This is a great community. Thanks for hanging in there everybody and I've been following not only the resources that people are kindly linking to when we discuss them but a whole range of other things that people are working on. Jessica, the work of Ready at Five is a wonderful recent example of linkages and folks are actually involved in their own apps development and people talking about wanting to get more information and more of a community going here and that's exactly our intention is to work with you and actually feature the very important work that you guys are doing. I want to say before the questions and I'll end with the moderator that if anybody wants to send me an email about work it's just Michael.Livine at sesame.org and I'm glad to communicate via email with any one of you if we can be helpful over here. So I'll turn it back to our wonderful moderator. Thank you so much. We've had so much chat in the background and we've been trying to share that out with everyone and very quickly I just want to reassure everyone before we get to maybe one or two questions all of the resources that Chip Lisa and Michael have shared will be given to you in the follow-up email and we're going to try to collect some of those other resources that participants and other learners have been so kind to share with us today and include that in the list of resources. Thank you so much. Chip I think this is a question for you about your book if the book is going to be available in Spanish. Good question. That's one I need to ask the publisher. I don't know of immediate plans for that to be the case which is very unfortunate. Thank you. I will say that if there are chapters in the book Chip that you think would be particularly of interest to professionals who work with Latino Hispanic families we have responses here where we could help you with that. I also see Karen Suarez asked a very excellent question Chip which I think we'll begin to think about and perhaps we're already doing some work on which is if an organization wants to promote or be media mentors what's the best route for training and resources? I think that's the sort of stuff that we need to make up. Right, exactly. Especially that fundamental conversation we all had about digital media literacy and what do you need to know? I think we're all raising the bar here. We're expecting a lot from teachers and there are barriers to achieving that along the way. In my part of the world teacher preparation and those who prepare teachers are going to have to really embrace this idea as well. I see media mentorship not just about knowledge and skills but really about a desire to interact and build relationships around ways that media can support young children. Chip if I could jump in on that question too. The question of how one can train to become a media mentor I think we may be at a phase now where we need to engage in a serious way with various organizations that work with faculty members at iSchools and library schools around the country to understand better what the coursework is at present for those who are working in early literacy children's librarians and early childhood programs and then to make sure that we're helping to provide resources that they may not feel like they can put their fingers on right now. I think even more importantly in a certain respect Lisa is to work with those who could provide in-service training and support through the professional association. And through organizations like Chip's who reach educators of many different stripes. So we're going to need to figure out some ways to do this kind of hard work that Karen is asking about to define what is a knowledge base that actually should be every media mentor needs to know and be able to do and be able to practice. Daryl is also asking something very much related to this which is very, very busy librarians is Daryl Robertson's question is a busy public librarian do each week to be a better media mentor. What are three things that they should do each week? Boy, that's a great question. That's a good question, right? I mean I just think about myself like how do I keep up? And it's hard. I do think that there's some journalistic resources out there that are helpful. So on EdWeek there's the digital directions and there's ways to kind of tap into what's going on. I'm going to do a call out to Michael's blog at the John Gantz Cooney Center. The Cooney Center also will run really interesting articles about connections between all sorts of deeper learning that children need and where technology fits with it. And there have been, this has been referenced to blogs like Little Elit and others where various groups like that where various librarians are connected to each other in the early childhood space. Chip, I really think it's through your center in a lot of people following what you're doing and where you're speaking. That a lot of those connections are made. But I'm probably also missing several things. There are lots about some specifics. One of the things that we've been having great success with inside of a school or a center where there's a group of teachers is really encouraging them to create an app play group, a tech play group. And there's two ways to do this. One is that everybody in the group plays with the same app for a week or two and then we come back and talk about it. The other way is that we all pick a different app and we come back and talk about it. But that idea that we've got to have some play time. I'm not sure how we get how we really use technology as a playful tool for learning if the adults aren't playful with technology. So I'm a big proponent of that. So some play time on your own and then some sharing with other teachers I think is a way to really start the process. And then we've got resources at the tech center as in the American Community Center. So we'll try to connect you to some things that are going on. I would say, just off the top of my head, I'd take two of the things that we just discussed and add a third one. I would spend some time between a half an hour and an hour every week just reading, looking at blogs, looking at literature. I would definitely try to play with the kids and the families a bit. So the play time that Chip just described and I would spend an hour asking questions if I could of the kids and of the parents who are in the library. There's some very, very interesting research that many of you know about in which she looks at the different kinds of experiences that children of privilege and children of lesser means receive when they're sitting in community libraries and she just finds that there's just different kinds of experiences that kids have not related to the library themselves per se, but just because of the knowledge and the mentoring that they have in the library. So having conversations with the parents and especially with the kids who are in your libraries will make you a better media mentor. Great advice. Thank you. Yes, there is so much discussion and a really robust... I mean the chats are still coming in. We are at the top of the hour and I want to be aware of some of the most important constraints. There are a couple things I do need to do to close out the webinar before people jump off and get back to their busy lives working with or young children. Please do, if you have a moment, as I thank our presenters, this has been an amazing conversation. We're trying to chat out as much as we can on the back end to all of you, but don't worry if you have to jump off all of the resources that Michael, Lisa, and Chip and all of your peers on this webinar shared will make sure to get you a really good resource document as a follow-up. We do want to know though one thing you learned today, TechSoup here in partnership with the Early Learning Lab. It's very important that we know what you find useful and what you learn during our educational events such as this webinar that you are really super excited about and you want to share with your colleagues or within your professional network. Let us know what that is. Another thing is you will see a pop-up survey at the end of this webinar or if you're closing out right now there will be a pop-up survey. I do want to ask on behalf of the Early Learning Lab, Chip, Lisa, and Michael and me for you to complete that survey. There are specific questions you can ask and also if you would like to connect with the Early Learning Lab after this webinar so that we can follow up with you and send you information. TechSoup is a nonprofit organization that serves nonprofits and libraries. If you don't know about TechSoup you should definitely check us out www.techsoup.org You can also find out about some of our donated products such as Microsoft. We also have Reading Eggs which is an early literacy program. Seriously, this has been one of the most engaging backend chats that we've had. It's been amazing. I'm really appreciative of everyone responding to and sharing their resources. Chip, Lisa, and Michael, thank you so much for taking your valuable time to put this presentation together as well as sharing all of your resources. I've learned a lot even having been in the early literacy field. So thank you so much. And Chip Hall, I don't know if you wanted to say anything but you have connected these resources with our audience. Thank you so much. And thank the Early Learning Lab. Thank you, Susan, and all I would like to say is fabulous presentation from the audience. These questions are amazing. All the resources shared with gratitude. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Yes, as we close out, thank you. I also want to extend a sincere thank you to Becky, who's been on our backend. She has been fast as fingers. She's been chatting everything out as fast as she could. Join us on June 30th. We're going to have an Outlook webinar. And you can come to that whether you are a member of TechSoup or not. We also want to thank ReadyTalk, who provides this platform for TechSoup to be able to deliver these webinars. And to all of you that have stayed through this for the 90, actually 95 minutes now, thank you so much. Thank you, and we appreciate your time. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Take care.