Foundations of Educational Technology - Twitter Educational Post

I am posting: “The Power of Parent Talk” power-point (PP) presentation as one of the artifacts for the Foundations of Educational Technology course (Summer 2017).  This presentation is based on the Thirty Million Words Initiative, TMW INITIATIVE, that I had recommended on twitter as an important educative side that teaches parents how to help children increase their language acquisition. Moreover, The Power of Parent Talk PP presentation was created with the purpose of informing parents of the facts behind the Early Literacy Program (ELP) that emerged in Columbus West School in Cicero, IL.

In Spring 2017, Mrs. Jain, a second-grade teacher, introduced me to the book “The Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain” by Dana Suskind.  The book is about how the importance of talking to a child from birth to 3 years old.  This is key for young children to have the pattern of language in their brain.  So knowing this, Mrs. Jain and I took a proactive role in creating a project called “The Early Literacy Program”.  This program was aimed to 15 parents who had infants between 0 to 3 years old and have not gone to school yet.  The project lasted 10 weeks, where parents and children participated for a period of 30 minutes.  During this time, we picked one topic per week and developed activities such as: read aloud, songs, rhymes, and collaborative activities between parents and children.  They also were asked to fill out a read log at home and practice what they were working on during the session.  Parents participation was great and students were enthusiastic to come to school.  It was satisfactory to know parents said their infants started to use new words and became more interested in reading books.  The quality time spending with the children and family was important as well. Overall, this program contributes to the development of oral language in young children.  We would like to continue to do this so we can keep assisting future students to be ready to enter school. 

The Power of Parent Talk PP is a concrete example of how to use technology to transmit knowledge in a specific field, in this case, early oral language development. This presentation displays a condensed work of digital research, suggestions, videos and reference for increasing parent’s awareness about the power of parent talk. Through the knowledge acquired in the Foundations of Educational Technology course, I was able to revise and modify the presentation. I learned about the technology standards stating within the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). As a matter fact, fulfilling the digital citizen standard, I cited all the images/photograph/graphs and videos of the presentation that were missed in the original PP presentation. I found The Power of Parent Talk PP presentation very beneficial and will  continue using it with parents. However, I believe that it still needs to be polished and must include more digital research tools for parents to explore and have more collaborative tools for parents and presenters to interact. Further actions would be parents creating their own videos to share how effective the power parent talk is for helping children increase preparedness for kindergarten and build foundational vocabulary.