This Baby Will Be Ready to Tackle Common Core Technology. What’s Not to Love?

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Witnessed at a restaurant this past week: a child less than 2 years old entertaining herself the entire time while three adults conversed before dinner, and then the two parents ignored her while eating dinner:

Her swiping skills were exceptional.  Her connection with adults was minimal.  The only times she interacted with her parents was when they gave her a cracker when dinner was being served and the toddler did not miss a beat as she kept swiping and eating simultaneously.  She did not start crying until the end of the parents’ dinner and her mother took her into her arms.

Having baby entertain herself allowed the parents to have a dinner consisting of adult conversation with no baby interruptions.  But what is this doing to the baby?  One British expert says not to worry, it’s actually beneficial to babies:

Another British scientist disagrees with Karmiloff-Smith and contends that babies using electronic devices is harmful to human development:

An article in mosaicsience.com gives anecdotal stories of what happens when babies use technology and the melt downs babies have when this occurs:

Jessica’s tiny fingers dart around the iPad, swiping through photos to get to a particularly entertaining video: a 12-second clip of her dancing to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies”. The 18-month-old taps “play” and emits a squeal of delight. When Jessica’s mum, Sandy, tries to take away the iPad, there’s a tantrum that threatens to go nuclear: wobbly lip, tears, hands balled into fists and a high-pitched wail. “She does this a lot,” says Sandy. “She seems to prefer the iPad to everything else. Sometimes it’s the only thing that will keep her quiet.” Technology companies and app developers are throwing their marketing prowess at the problem, slapping words such as “educational” and “e-learning” on their products, often without any scientific basis. But like many parents, Sandy is worried about her child’s obsession with screens. She wants to know which activities are best, and how much time spent on screens is too much.

On each of Max’s ankles is a smartwatch of sorts, one measuring his movements and the other his heart rate. The cap uses electroencephalography (EEG) to record his brain’s electrical activity, to understand whether real and virtual objects trigger different brain responses and how that relates to subsequent learning.

(The article in it entirety, Smartphones won’t make your kids dumb. We think, may be found here.

Does anyone else find it sad that a baby is ignored at dinnertime in a restaurant and there is little to no interaction between the baby and parents?  What happened with bringing crayons and a coloring book?  Would that provide better eye/hand coordination for young children?  At the least, it provided refrigerator art for the house or the grandparents.  What does a child have to show for playing a video game?  As iPad use becomes more widespread, education will adapt to the effect it has on child development.

From the article, “The app marketplace is a digital Wild West,” says Michael Levine, Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center in New York, which has analysed hundreds of children’s literacy apps in a series of reports.  Remember what else was The Wild West in education?  Education reformer Scott Joftus said it years ago:

You know we’re in a new era when school turnaround firms in the U.S. are being funded out of the Middle East,” Joftus said. “To me, that says there’s money to be made. I call this period the Wild West in education.”

There’s a lot of money to be made in educational technology now mandated in Common Core classrooms.  Just think how technology ready these little babies will be when they start pre-school at age 3.  Will they then need classes to teach them how to social interactions that they didn’t learn in their technology time spent on baby iPad programs?  Is this the new 21st Century learner?

I’ve got to say, it was heartbreaking to see this little child being ignored at dinner.  What does this do to a child?

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