Happy Anniversary to Our Early Ed Watch Podcast

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Early Ed Watch podcast!

For a year now, the Early Education Initiative has been featuring education experts from across the country in our bi-weekly podcast. Making the podcasts has been informative and entertaining– and we hope our listeners enjoy listening to the podcasts as much as we enjoy making them.

Interested in listening (or re-listening) to a podcast? You can now find them all listed on the Early Education Initiative’s homepage, and on our new podcast page. Podcasts can be streamed or downloaded from our site, or you can find them on iTunes by searching for the New America Foundation’s podcast series.

Below, in no particular order, are our 5 most popular podcasts to date. Enjoy!

1. Apps, iPhones and Young Kids

Do the “apps” in the education section of the iTunes store really deserve the label “educational” – or are they no more than eye-candy for the next generation of gamers? Early Ed Watch spoke with Carly Schuler, research associate at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, about what makes these apps attractive to young kids, which apps show signs of being developmentally appropriate, and what teachers and parents should keep in mind when – as happens often in our house – children start asking “Mom, can I play on your phone?”

2. Parents, Books and the Roots of Literacy

Conventional wisdom tells us that children learn to read in school, but research continues to show how much the skills that influence a child’s reading success are being established long before they arrive in those pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classrooms. For a taste of what this research means and its implications for schools and early childhood programs, Early Ed Watch spoke with  Gabrielle Miller, a former teacher and national expert on early literacy interventions whose work has included running several initiatives for Reading is Fundamental and developing programs for the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, MD.

3. Launching 12 Studies of Home Visiting Programs

Last October, the Pew Home Visiting Campaign announced grants for 12 new research projects to pinpoint what works in home visiting programs. For this podcast, we spoke with Jill Antonishak, research manager for the Pew program, to hear what we might learn from the new studies.

4. The Future of Promise Neighborhoods

Promise Neighborhoods, a competitive grant program, seeks to borrow many of the ideas from the Harlem Children’s Zone and apply them to high-poverty neighborhoods across the country. Early Ed Watch spoke with Patrick Lester, senior vice president for public policy at the United Neighborhoods Centers of America. Mr. Lester provides some insight on the 21 Promise Neighborhoods grantees and digs into what might be the biggest question now facing the program: What will happen to funding for the Promise Neighborhoods program in the new Congress?

5. FirstSchool Aims to Transform Early Education

Anyone who has followed early education issues knows there is a big disconnect between the ideal learning environments for young children, age 3 to age 8, and what they experience on a daily basis in their schools and pre-k or childcare centers. A relatively new program called FirstSchool, an initiative led by the FPG Child Development Institute and the education school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, aims to bring the ideal much closer to reality. For this podcast, we spoke with Sharon Ritchie, senior scientist at FPG Institute and co-director of FirstSchool, to hear how the program works and what’s on the horizon.