You might know our Story: One Globe Kids started out years ago as an idea to develop an international book series for children. It soon turned into a digital story series, to be shared on the iPad and iPhone for children by children. Today, One Globe Kids is a Digital Education Platform, build around global stories of real children for world explorers 3 to 99 years. We hope every user will experience something valuable while working with them. And there is no right (or wrong) way to do so. As anyone who interacts regularly with children knows, you can discuss the same topic in many different ways, especially as a child grows and has an increased ability to understand complex topics.
Along the way from ‘book idea’ to ‘education platform’, we learned a lot about our target One Globe Kids users. Including Digitods. When we started out, the market for education apps in the App Store was tiny. Meanwhile, there is an overwhelming choice in apps for children, teachers and parents and you can learn almost anything with the help of an app. To make sure One Globe Kids would make it to the lists of “Good Apps”, we studied our competition and our market in detail.
We learned a lot from the many conversation with educators, app users, global parents and media experts, including the co-authors of ‘Toddlers on Technology’. In this book we found all we needed to know about what it means that today’s toddlers know more about the iPad than their parents do. And about how these DigiTods learn faster than any generation before them and why they love to learn. The book explains in detail how children have different learning styles: how they go about accumulating knowledge. The book also points out that “to be fully human, children need to balance intellectual, physical, social and emotional intelligence”. For every app the authors reviews (see their website), they add See-Saw activities, non-digital activities that go hand in hand with what the child has learned during screen time.
While only our stories of Gabou and Valdo were available at the time, One Globe Kids is briefly mentioned in the book!
Good apps for Digitods
Good apps “involve developing skills and increasing children’s knowledge of the world around them”. With the help of the knowledge we gained from working on our own app, we came up with 10 questions that we at One Globe Kids think you need to answer before offering any app to your child. (Depending on the child’s age, the right answer might vary!):
- Can your child start working with the app without help of a grown up?
- Is it interactive? Is there repetition?
- Can your child easily navigate the app?
- Is the app visually attractive?
- Is the content suitable for his/her age?
- What do you want your child to take from working with this app?
- How does the content go with what he/she is working on at school?
- Are there any hidden costs, ads or social media connections in the app?
- Does the app work with your child’s learning style?
- Will the app be fun?
We are interested to hear about both your and your Digitods’ experience with the One Globe Kids App and Online Friends. Please drop us a line!
Stay Globe Smart, Sanny Zuiderveld
