Technology Integration with Dr Chip Donohue

Dr Chip Donohue is the foremost expert on technology integration in early childhood education and recently I had the privilege and pleasure to present one of his presentations. In it, he discussed how the Covid pandemic changed and exposed new concerns about screentime in early childhood. He then provide practical and immediately actionable advice on what you can as an early childhood practitioner to take advantage of what is happening and enhance learning and embrace technology positively today. Read the whole transcript here today.

Video Transcript

Michael - Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you are. My name is Michael Hilkemeijer from ICTE Solutions Australia, and it's my great pleasure to have a guest presenter of such expertise as Dr. Chip Donohue to present what he calls are his all time favourites. His all time favourites, and I am so looking forward to this. Bit of background on Chip. First of all, Chip, you don't mind me calling you Chip?

Chip - That's fine. Perfect. Yap.

Michael - Okay. He's the Founding Director of the Technology in Early Childhood Center at Erikson Institute, is a Senior Fellow at the Fred Rogers Center, and also a Dean of Distance Learning and Continuing Education at the Technology Education Center as well. So wherever you're listening to, watching today, or tonight, or evening, this presentation, I'm sure will will enlighten you and we'll be sure to help you in your goals in being able to effectively use technology in the early learning environment. So just before I continue, Chip has provided a handout which I'll have attached in the chat for anyone who wants to download and follow along through the presentation. Also in the chat as well, I have provided links to my LinkedIn and social media group, as well as to my free online course, and my free articles from my website there. So feel free to drop by anytime and have a look at that and see how you can further learn in this area. So without any further chatting, Chip, it's my pleasure to have you and it's all yours.

- Delighted to be here. Let's see if we can get this working. I think you've got it. Is that good?

Michael - Yes, we can see that. Yes.

- All right. Excellent. So thank you for the invitation, thanks for the opportunity to talk about what I've been reflecting on a lot in the last year or so as we struggled through the pandemic which is, what really matters when we talk about young children and technology? We have lots of ideas, we have lots of teaching methods, we have lots of technologies, but in the end, what does it really come down to? So that's what I'm gonna talk about today, at least my perspective on that.

Before I really kinda jump in, take a look at the image that's on the screen right now. It's one of my favorite photos from a classroom in Chicago Public Schools. It was not staged, this was what was happening. What I love about this photo is, look at where the eye contact between the teacher and the and the young girl on the right, look at where the three boys are looking, which is at the screen, look at the smiles on everybody's faces, and look at there's only one iPad and five of them sharing that. So to me that all of those things speak to what I'm gonna talk about today, which is the importance of relationships, the importance of cooperation and collaboration around technology, and how technology can create this opportunity, so just wanted you to take a look at that as we begin.

So as Michael said, I'm Chip Donohue. I have been at this for a long time, I began thinking about young children and technology and technology integration in around 1983, when the first Apple IIe computer went into a classroom here in Madison, Wisconsin, where I lived at that time, I was a Montessori director. Parents in the school came in with all these big boxes and their stuff, laid them on my desk and said, "This is really cool. We got to figure out how to do this with children." So that really sparked my interest, and it's been going on since. At the lower left of the screen are just the covers of three of my books. And I wanna mention that because while I edited those books, really the role that really means the most to me was as a convener. That I brought together 55 different contributing authors across those three books, people who are thought leaders in our field. And what a pleasure it is to kinda stir the soup and see what other people have to say about these things. So that's really the intent they're talking about.

But also you have a little Australian context there. Kate Highfield wrote two chapters for me in the three books, Susie Edwards wrote a chapter in the third book, and Christy Goodwin wrote a chapter in the second book.

So there has been some back and forth between Australia and myself.

The others on the bottom are really just things I've written. The forward four are reports that I've been part of, and this one here, the one to the left of that group on the right, is our national position statement in the United States. And I've included that because just when ECA was getting ready to look at your national position statement on young children and digital technologies, I was in Australia to speak at the conference, and I had a chance to meet with that planning group before everything got started to talk about what our experience was in the United States around process more than content. The content was well known to us, it was certainly well known to folks in Australia.

Okay, so let's just take a moment to think about the pandemic because we're not done with it quite yet, at least not here in the United States, but it occurs to me that we learned a new language along the way. Look at some of these words: Pandemic, I didn't know what that was two years ago, coronavirus, COVID-19, variants, omicron. These are things that have become part of our regular conversation. But the next group is really important as well, shelter-in-place, lockdown, isolation, quarantine, and then masks, social distancing, vaccination boosters, all of this.?

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