Over the last year I have been writing and exploring ideas around curating children’s digital tools and content. There is now so much media out there for children that parents and educators often struggle to know what tools are most useful for supporting children’s learning, educating them while they are entertained and have a level of quality that previously has been curated for us by other professionals.
Increasingly, I am less concerned with the issue of whether digital content is age appropriate (though that is important and there is more than enough focus on that). I am more concerned about how we establish whether content is of good quality for children and students. I believe there are two steps in this process. Firstly, we need to filter the many and various digital tools and apps available. There are several ways we could do this, but a good way would be to focus on the capacity the technology has to engage, to facilitate learning and to improve children’s skills and knowledge for the 21st Century. This would obviously not focus on content, but on design. How well does the user interface and the digital space meet the needs and capacity of children and students, given the intended age and development of the tool?
This will allow those with the skills and knowledge to assess the quality of content to have fewer apps to choose from. It presents them with the best designed apps and allows them to begin to develop processes and ways to assess what is quality digital content and what isn’t.