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of the curriculum across the subject areas and determine where progression
seems natural and where progression may seem disjointed.

Conclusion My friend and colleague Peter Pizzolongo, early childhood specialist and
former associate executive director for professional development for NAEYC,
knows full well that play, exploration, and inquiry are at the heart of a high-
quality early childhood program, and that technology should play a role in
those pillars. He offers a bit of his experience and perspective:
“Technology and interactive media are here to stay.” That’s a line from the
position statement on technology developed by NAEYC and the Fred Rogers
Center. And, as with most tools used by teachers, there are appropriate uses
and inappropriate uses of technology. I’ve seen examples of the inappropriate
uses; we all have. And we’ve also seen appropriate uses. An issue of Young
Children included an article, “Classroom Bird Feeding: Giving Flight to the
Imaginations of 4- and 5-Year-Olds!” In this article, the author described a
play-based, exploratory, collaborative experience in which children’s inter-
est in birds led to many discoveries. Noticing many different kinds of birds
attracted to a birdfeeder, the children and teacher consulted birding websites
to help identify the birds. Obtaining information via the Internet is a natural
occurrence for most adults—and increasingly for young children as well.

I began my journey in the world of technology and young children thirty
years ago. I was interested in strategies preschoolers used to understand
patterns. My favorite tool for this was a set of wooden attribute blocks. The
blocks differed by shape (circle, square, triangle), colors, and size (small,
bigger, biggest). I would create a tic-tac-toe pattern with the blocks, such as
“rows of same-size triangle, circle, square; columns of red, blue, yellow.” I
would remove one of the blocks and ask, “What’s missing?” Noticing the two
attributes, children would determine that they needed a yellow circle, or a
red square, etc. As children mastered the single-object-per-cell two-attribute
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