Are Computers Good for Children?

On a couple of occasions last year, I was asked by students to point them towards information which documented the potential harmful effects that using computers could have on children. So perhaps some of you will be interested in a recent piece of US / Austalian research; the report is entitled Are Computers Good for Children? The Effects of Home Computers on Educational Outcomes, and takes a detailed look at this topic.

Free Social Care Resources

Already missing lectures and work..? ;-)

If you've an interest in social care and related issues, then you might want to look at a free collection of e-learning resources which have recently been made available by the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE). You will need to register with the site first, but this is free, and gives you access to a range of videos, case studies, interactive quizzes and more. To see what's available, just click here.

New DCSF Research

Two recent reports from the DCSF should be of interest to many of our students:

The first is entitled Extended Schools: Testing the Delivery of the Core Offer in and Around Extended Schools and looks at how this key area of Every Child Matters is currently being delivered.

Also new is Family Intervention Projects: An Evaluation of their Design, Set-up and Early Outcomes; this reports looks at how successful some projects have been since they were set up in 2006. For more background on Family Intervention Projects, click here.

New Early Years Foundation Stage

It's Early Years Week on Teacher's TV, which means that their schedule is dominated by programmes relating to younger children. In particular, the channel is helping school staff to make sense of the new, forthcoming Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) by showing relevant episodes from it's EYFS Today series. Teacher's TV is available on FreeView Channel 88, or all of it's output is available in full through the website.

Listening to Children about Childcare

The Daycare Trust is currently undertaking a project entitled 'Listening to Families about Childcare'. As part of this, last week they released a report entitled Listening to Children about Childcare; this is a short piece of research which reports back on interviews which the Trust carried out with children aged between 6-12.

Bercow Report

A few months ago I posted about the Bercow Review, which was commissioned by the DCSF to look at services for children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN). Today sees the publication of the final report, which you can access here; to read a summarised version, follow this link.

Among the recommendations in the report is a suggestion that all children should be assessed for speech problems at the beginning of both primary and secondary school. In response, the government has promised £40m for the training of early years staff. For more details, take a look at this BBC story.

Global Learning

A survey by educational charity DEA has suggested that many children in England are being left 'globally illiterate', as their schools are not educating them about the wider world. DEA has recently launched a new project entitled Our Global Future: How can Education Meet the Challenge of Change, and the newly released report is the first output to appear. You can access the full survey from this link.

Parents Survey

Last week saw the publication of the DCSF's Survey of Parents in England 2008. This is a short(ish) piece of research which looks at how satisfied parents are with the schools that their children attend, and their feelings about their local authorities' role in providing educational services.

Also, following on from Monday's post, all of the Blackwell journals affected by the Athens change are now fully accessible from the Wiley-InterScience site.

Stay Alert!

I've written on here before about the usefulness of free alerting services such as OnTheWeb and Childlink's Weekly Update, which will send you relevant information to your subject area without you having to go hunting for it. So if you want to stay on top of developments in children-related matters over the summer, then hopefully today's post will be useful for you.

The NSPCC has a service called CASPAR (Current Awareness Service for Policy, practice And Research) which will send you a weekly email; this contains details of news stories, research, reports and upcoming conferences. To start receiving CASPAR, follow this link and then click on 'Sign up for email alerts' and follow the instructions.

Also recommended are the various bulletins which you can subscribe to from the Children & Young People Now website. Follow this link to be presented with a choice of 5 different alerts to pick from. Most of them are weekly, but if you crave a more regular fix of new information then the Children & Young People Daily service comes highly recommended. Though if you sign up to this one, then a lot of the posts on here will seem strangely familiar... :-)