Research shows that PBS KIDS educational programming across media platforms is highly trusted by parents, extremely appealing to children, and can have real impact in narrowing the achievement gap. We are constantly examining how new technologies effect children, exploring new ways to leverage PBS KIDS characters as educational magnets, and how to co-opt and deploy new technologies for anywhere, anytime learning in underserved communities.

The recent success of PBS KIDS’ cross-platform content in advancing children’s literacy learning (http://www.pbs.org/about/media/about/cms_page_media/146/raising_readers_a_story_of_success_1.pdf) has led us to posit that kids who interact with our math content across multiple platforms will learn more than those who just interact with our math content on one platform. Through a forward-looking grant from the U.S. Department of Education called Ready To Learn (RTL), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and PBS are pioneering and testing this transmedia approach to learning. We are working with top producers of every kind of kids media along with technology experts, educators and researchers to produce transmedia suites – collections of video clips, online games, mobile apps and interactive whiteboard games that feature the same characters and all tie to the same curriculum framework – to help build early math skills of children ages 2-8, particularly from low-income communities. Public television stations and their partners are delivering this content on-air, on-line, and on-the ground to children throughout the nation.

Public media’s transmedia approach to learning looks at different inputs for kids. For example, usability testing has revealed that tablets and other touch screen devices are more intuitive and appealing to young children than a clunky keyboard and mouse. In addition, we’re experimenting with game mechanics that use a computer’s microphone and web cam, and require children to clap or make gestures – to jump or use their hands to make moves in a game. We’re also conducting experiments with augmented reality, immersive world environments, and 3D-rendered collaborative play. It’s critical that we understand how these technologies work and we are partnering with a tremendous set of technologists and producers like Professor Blair MacIntyre from Georgia Tech and Bill Shribman from WGBH in Boston to unleash the learning potential of each platform. At the same time, we know that a three year old needs a very different match of technology than a five year old, so everything we do is driven by age-appropriate skill and curriculum frameworks. We are working with child development experts to ensure that we pair the right technologies with the right skill sets for the right age groups, and we’ve developed a best practices guide to help PBS KIDS producers make the right matches when designing their transmedia content.

In addition to creating highly engaging, developmentally appropriate transmedia content for kids, public media understands the critical importance of the context in which the content is used. To that end, public media recently launched the PBS KIDS Lab website (www.pbskids.org/lab) to provide guidance on how to use our transmedia content to strengthen adult-child relationships, and how to integrate our transmedia content into formal and informal home, school, and out-of-school learning environments. The Lab website is home for a growing set of home, classroom, and community activities as well as resources for parents, caregivers, and educators so they can be well-informed mediators of the media for their students and children.

Empowering the adults in children’s lives to be knowledgeable transmedia mediators is the goal behind our Ready To Learn-funded partnerships with the Boston University School of Education (BU-SED), with Chicago Public Schools Virtual Pre-K and K (VPK) program, and with the Campaign for Grade Level Reading (CGLR). BU-SED is piloting and testing teaching modules to help preschool teachers successfully integrate media into their classrooms to enhance students’ learning, and VPK is creating resources to bridge learning at home and in school. CGLR is partnering with us to create a free bi-lingual mobile app for Android and IOS platforms that will be launching later this year. The mobile app will be designed to equip parents of children ages birth to five with insights on the stages of their children’s growth and will feature a variety of ways to foster literacy and math development through intergenerational on-screen activities (for parents of children ages 2-4) and off-screen activities (for parents of children ages 0-2).

Assessing the impact of our transmedia content is key and renowned third-party researchers including WestEd, EDC, and SRI Interactional are conducting the formative and summative evaluations to test the efficacy of our approach in both formal and informal settings. In addition, public media is working with UCLA CRESST to prototype a progress tracking system that will feature a COPPA-compliant identify system, sophisticated data analysis tools, and reporting applications that equip parents and educators with the means to measure children’s progress across multiple platforms, in real time.

Our transmedia approach to learning requires all of us who work in this space to turn our attention to capacity-building in the field, including high-quality teacher professional development, family training, and a push for a national policy movement to equip America’s Title I elementary schools and early childcare centers in underserved communities with cutting-edge digital technology tools, so that our children, both in school and in out-of-school settings, are not left behind.

In my current post I’m seen as distinctly eccentric by most of the staff (maybe I am a little:-) many of our teachers still wear their technological ignorance as a badge of pride – one young-ish teacher (clutching his iPad as a kind of techno-sucking blanket) proclaimed last week to generally amused approval that he had no idea what a blog was (I merely smiled thinly).
Yet I know no teachers who do not wish to provide the best possible education for their students.
Let me make this clear: I am not counselling despair but unless this paradox is fully appreciated the developments in the delightful learning experiences we would all expound will fall on mostly stony ground within our education establishment. We are all a long way ahead of the thinking about technologically-aided learning of very many teachers and politicians. I’m inclined to agree with John that formal education establishments failing to recognise the current shifts will wither and die, though I’d much rather they evolved and grew. It will be long campaign: we should know our enemy and keep our powder dry.

Inanimate Alice exists in the gap between print literature and the kind of experience Conducttr offers. It is manageable and comprehensible by most teachers. It works on reasonably old equipment. It does not create difficulties with intellectual property or filters. It is, as Kate herself advocates, a good story. Like Alice, the blueprint needs to be a transmedia experience in itself that can be used with pleasure by teachers for the kind of self-directed learning transmedia allows. It should be lightly written, with a wit that removes the friction of learning by avoiding worthiness. It should be accessible at a simple level, yet layered so that teachers who wish to go further can drill down into it. It needs to make accessible: key concepts, tools, examples, tutorials, resources and participatory support. The medium should be the message.