With technology advancing more quickly than ever before, the world of information has few barriers; however, the world of education relies on scaffolding for age-appropriate context and content to help young learners grow. Too much too fast cannot only overwhelm a child, but confuse them and expose them to content outside of their reach of understanding. More and more educators and parents realize the need to choose wisely when they hand their children a screen for education or entertainment.
This is the first article in a six-part series exploring the educational value of using Pubbly as a helper — as a child, parent, or educator — and how Pubbly engages users, granting them access to an enhanced reading experience in a safe environment. Pubbly meets children's curiosity and need for engagement with education and online games to build their love of learning.
When you offer Pubbly to your child or student, you are offering joyful educational experiences in a safe environment. Unlike other online platforms where educational content can be garnered — Youtube, Amazon, etc. — Pubbly is expressly designed to be safe and kid-friendly. With other platforms, there may be content that is useful and safe for kids, but is unexpectedly spliced with an advertisement that is not, or promotes a toy that a parent would rather not negotiate about for the rest of the day.
While Pubbly is a digital platform, it’s still a closed environment engineered directly for kids — whether on Kindle, an Ipad, or a parent’s phone — that cannot be intercepted by outside advertising or information. Older learners can easily navigate through the levels of Pubbly content, while parents can rest assured that they will only discover more educational enhancements built for their betterment. Likewise, younger learners may enjoy a story of The Fourth Little Pig while a parent completes a phone call nearby.
Once you enter Pubbly, you can be 100% confident that your child will benefit from their ever-growing repertoire of stories and games without any safety drawbacks. There is no place in Pubbly for young learners to meet and interact with strangers. Kaspersky, a global leader in cyber security, recommends talking “to your children about not interacting with strangers online” and affirms a parent’s need to “run a deep scan of their hard drive every month to ensure nothing suspicious” has found its way onto your computer. Even as adults, making friends online can be problematic.1 These threats do not exist on the Pubbly platform. Pubbly’s choice to forego hosting a space for online social interaction gives users the opportunity to focus solely on Pubbly’s fun, educational content with ease.
When the love of learning is placed as the center focus, the measurement of success changes. Humans have more data points to analyze than ever before – whether it be in education, business, or parenting. While this does serve a purpose, it can be tempting to only rely on day-to-day metrics of performance, which cannot capture the long-term resilience of internal joy and passion ignited. Caregivers want to know they are doing the best they can, giving children every advantage, but some evidence takes time to bloom and grow. Educators know the gold standard of learning is building a skillset that lasts, one a young learner carries internally, choosing to nourish on their own.
With a commitment to cognitive development, Pubbly is less focused on dashboards and metrics and more focused on the educational experience; users of all ages are free to explore the site and everything available without feeling like they are being pigeonholed into one or two categories of content for data collection and progress monitoring. So, yes, they will progress in their learning, but perhaps more importantly, they will enjoy and feel good about what they are doing, and this joy is not easily measured by the charts and graphs that have become so commonplace with most online programs for kids.
Everything. There is something for every young reader at Pubbly. There are picture books and interactive animated books such as Five Huge Dinosaurs, Peter Rabbit, and Why Does the Lion Roar? — a re-illustrated African folk tale with an interactive coloring component — along with much, much more.
A series of 30 interactive graphic novels puts a fun spin on classics like Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, and Don Quixote for an older reader to engage with time-tested tales in a new way. A previous article, What the Future of Reading Looks Like, discussed that young brains light up with the content that they are reading, so sharing older stories of character and strength engages a young reader with similar reflective inquiries in their own life as they learn to navigate the world.
Plus, Pubbly understands the importance of educational games and activities in math, spelling, and reading to transform a screen from a passive experience into active engagement that is joyful and appropriate for developing minds. Pubbly houses comprehensive educational programs in a range of curriculum areas that contain books and related activities. These are thematically or topically organized in a series so curious minds can submerge themselves in self-directed learning. It’s not enough to simply present our children with information; we must also guide them to become discerning digital learners at a young age by cultivating rich engagement experiences.
Welcome to Pubbly, where children come first.
Pubbly is dedicated to having a portion of our animated books, educational programs, and games FREE and open to early learners everywhere. Sign up now to view on desktop or download our Pubbly Player on iOS, Kindle, or Android. The following article will explore Pubbly’s animated and interactive picture books and their many categories.
1. https://usa.kaspersky.com