Wired writer Daniel Donahoo has spent a year researching, using, and writing about new digital media tools and content made for children for Wired’s Geek Dad blog.

In a recent blog post, he explored the challenges of curating children’s content for quality and learning value.

Among Donahoo’s sources of guidance on the subject is A Statement on the Development of a Framework for Quality Digital Media for Young Children, a position statement being developed by NAEYC and the Fred Rogers Center.

I was reminded about one of the key points in [the Statement] that is so important to consider when developing digital tools to support children’s learning and development. That is:

“Quality” and “educational” are not the same thing. Media with educational intent are not necessarily high in production or content quality, and media of high production quality can be intended purely to entertain. Digital media can fulfill different developmental and learning needs for young children at different times, and even media content intended for entertainment has an educational impact.

While agreeing with the distinctions raised by NAEYC and FRC’s work, he notes the difficulty in determining the educational or learning value of new digital tools and content beyond the claims of the producers behind the work.

Increasingly, I am less concerned with the issue of whether digital content is age appropriate…I am more concerned about how we establish whether content is of good quality for children and students…

So, who is curating content and where can we go at the moment to try to work our way through the overwhelming amount of digital material and tools out there for our children?

To help build develop an evaluation system, Donahoo has assembled several resources for evaluating Children’s content in his post. Among those mentioned included research centers like Fred Rogers and Joan Ganz Cooney, crowdsourcers like Common Sense Media, and the compendium of digital learning research data that is The Learning Registry.

See the rest of Donahoo’s recommendations and read the article at Wired’s Geek Dad blog.