I’m a mom, of course.  But I’m also a mom that carries two smart phones, reads WIRED magazine religiously, and has a passion for cutting-edge education.  My four-year-old daughter is a digital native who is immersed in media of all types, just like her 21^st century peers.  As a matter of fact, according to The Nielsen Company, pre-schoolers are spending about four hours a day with media of some kind.  What does great learning look like in today’s world given all the tools at fingertips?  mobilemediamom is intended  to answer that question each month.

Today, hundreds of millions of Americans have cell phones (93%)… the smart phone piece of that pie is already closing in on 30%.  The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a part of Sesame Workshop, released “Learning: Is there an app for that?” in November of 2010.  In this study, the Cooney Center uses the term “the pass-back effect” to describe the action of an adult careprovider giving a child access to his or her smart phone.  This happens overwhelmingly when the parent is on the go.  Over 60% of the time, it happens in the car.

My pass-back effect began fondly in the summer of 2009, when my daughter was only two.  It was with the wonderful app, i Write Words, that our adventure into smart phone learning began.  Trips to the DQ that summer were filled with the dings, squeaks (if you are incorrect) and affirmations of this incredibly well designed app; it is a tremendous educational tool for early language learners and writers.

A must for all the apps that grace my phone (Even though Blackberry has the option for apps for children, the apps we use are for an iPhone 3.  If you have an iPad, you’ve got overachiever written all over you.) is attractive graphic design.  i Write Words (by gdiplus) is a super example of great graphics and intuitive user-interface.  i Write Words has a colorful interface and a happy crab that waggles back and forth to tell your finger where to start.  The actual drawings of the animals and objects that you spell are drawn by children themselves.   In addition, a thoughtful confidence-builder is that the letters appear in the child’s own writing rather than being converted back to a standardized font.  This is in addition to the adult and child that clap, play music and otherwise give the child overt praise when completing a word.

i Write Words allows kids to explore content with both letters (upper and lower case) alone, and numbers, as well as full words.  A sweet touch is the alphabet song, built to play on just a touch or a shake.

But the big revelation for me didn’t come with this app alone, but rather later when my daughter began to want to draw on the computer.  She could not navigate the mouse at all and figure out all that point and click stuff.  So, if the iPhone touch screen would not have been there, she would have delayed her attempts at writing and spelling.  (For more results about the research findings on the learning outcomes of apps, stay tuned for future blogs.)  Instead, she easily moved from iPhone to chalkboard to paper, and was writing her full name by three-and-a-half.

As you think about mobile media, I encourage you not just to think about the content, but the types of motor skills it helps your child develop.  By passing over the mouse entirely, the touch screen accelerated her ability to absorb one of the most fundamental concepts – the language she will speak for the rest of her life.

We invite you to comment on the i Write Words app and your experiences with it.