In this post I want to talk about a TED talk related to our project Connected, called 3 fears about screen time for kids and why they aren't true? By Sara DeWitt a worker in PBS kids, a television network directed at children. She tries to make the power of technology as positive as possible in children's life.
Sara starts the talk saying that we can be with our phone all day long but then when a child touches a screen everyone goes crazy and thinks that it's wrong for children to be with technological devices. She defends that it doesn't have to be in that way, that devices can be helpful in a child’s growth.
Miss DeWitt talks about three main fears that all people have about this topic. It is said that screens are passive, that if a child spends a lot of time with devices he/she would never go out. So what PBS team did was create a sort of interactive videogame where children could “be” animals. Therefore, when a child shut the screen down, he could still be that animal, and when he went out he remembered what he saw in the animal, how it was, what did it eat or the differences between that animal and the others.
Sara says that another fear is that playing games on the computer is nonsense and besides it distracts the child from its obligations. The company (PBS) created a series of games called Curious George that could predict children’s abilities, they could evaluate students. To do this, they compared some data analysis from the game with the average mark of each student.
Finally, the last fear is that sometimes, people think that screens isolate them from their child. Well, Sara says that’s not true, because although you can be away from them while they are playing, the child will be so excited about the videogame he/she just played that he/she could be talking about it for hours.
Personal opinion
I’ve always been told that screens are harmful for our health, that they could damage your eyes, your brain, your back, etc. I have always thought that, as everything, it is harmful if you abuse that thing. I mean, obviously that you are going to have bad eyesight if you have been watching a series or the computer for 20 hours without stop, but if you use it in the right way there is no need of this to happen.
On the other hand I think that children around the age of 3 years old, as the video says, shouldn’t be playing with computers or tablets so early; they should be exploring the world, discovering new things every day. It’s true that society progresses and maybe there are a lot of new ways to make a child discover things through a screen, but well, I believe it’s always more fun to hear the noise of an actual cow, rather than hearing it from a tablet.
Another thing that the video mentions is about learning or evaluating through videogames. Regarding this matter, I think the idea is quite good, but as a supplement, because yes, you can learn some skills from videogames that maybe a book wouldn’t give you, but there are things such as grammar, maths or physical education that a videogame can’t give you. In addition, I believe that it could be useful until a certain age, because as kids grow up maybe they won’t be as excited to play videogames as they were as children.
To sum up I want to say that it’s true that new technologies can help us a lot, but it’s also true that they can be harmful if we don’t use them in a correct way.
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