Can Texting Help Improve Childhood Literacy?

Parents often have the best intentions to work with their young kids on the alphabet, rhyming words, and other literacy skills. But with the rush to make dinner and get the kids to bed, it can be difficult to carry through on those intentions.
In an effort to provide assistance, Stanford University researchers have developed a program that sends texts providing literacy-development tips to parents of preschoolers, and now, a new study shows that participating in the program improved the kids test scores. At a cost of less than $1 per parent, it’s an affordable intervention that catches parents at moments during the day when they just might find five minutes to squeeze in reading a book with their kids.
The researchers implemented a pilot program, called READY4K!, during the 2013-2014 school year at 31 San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) preschools. These facilities that have long collaborated with Stanford as a sort of learning lab — testing the latest education techniques that the researchers develop. Of the 440 families with four-year-olds that participated in the program, half were sent literacy activity and fact texts three times a week such as, “By saying beginning word sounds, like ‘ttt’ in taco & tomato, you’re preparing your child 4 K,” or “Let your child hold the book. Ask what it is about. Follow the words with your finger as you read,” according to Motoko Rich of the New York Times. The other half received texts with school announcements and other placebo messages.
The results? Parents who received the literacy prompts spent more time engaged in reading-related activities with their kids than those in the control group did. Plus, their kids achieved higher scores on literacy tests than did kids in the control group, and that group of parents engaged with teachers more, too.
Susanna Loeb, the director of Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, tells May Wong of Phys.org, “The barrier to some of these positive parenting practices isn’t knowledge or desire, but it’s the crazy, busy lives. It’s difficult to have the time or focus to make all these choices as parents, and we’re helping parents do what they know they should do and what they want to do.” She also notes, “We know that changing parental behaviors has proven to be very difficult, so to get these positive effects from our texting program was very exciting.”
What might be even more exciting is the fact that this technique works for low-income and minority families, whose children often enter kindergarten with a significant vocabulary gap compared to higher-income peers.
“Parents really are the first teacher that a student has and are the most important teacher at that [early] age,” Loeb tells Wong. “They don’t have to do it the way teachers do it; they just have to work things in with their daily life.”
MORE: A Training Program That Improves Preschoolers’ Attention Spans

How Texting Can Improve the Health of Babies Born to Low-Income Mothers

Some app designers are now thinking beyond the traditional targets for their products and are focusing on how technology can help the poor instead.
As we’ve pointed out, Significance Labs sponsors three-month fellowship for entrepreneurs and software engineers as develop technology that serves the poor. (Twenty-five million American families live on less than $25,000 a year, yet 80 percent of low-income Americans own some kind of mobile device, according to Significance Labs’s website.)
One tool that reaches low-income Americans is Text4Baby, which can help expectant low-income and teenage mothers give birth to healthy babies, writes Jill Duffy for PC Magazine.
Text4Baby is a free service that sends pregnant women and new moms text-sized bits of wisdom and advice to support their health and parenting skills. The messages, which are available in either Spanish or English, are also tailored according to the zip code of the mother and the due date of the baby or age of the child.
The texts include health notices, such as the importance of cooking meat thoroughly and wearing a seat belt, descriptions of symptoms that shouldn’t be ignored and developmental updates as the baby grows. Texts also inform pregnant women when to schedule their next prenatal appointment and ask about blood tests they took in prior appointments.
These small, regular reminders, such as, “Even if U feel great, a pregnant woman needs checkups with a Dr./midwife (CNM/CM). For help with costs, call 800-311-2229,” can be a powerful tool for women with limited resources and support. Text4Baby messages also include information to help women access the necessary healthcare.
Tamara Grider, the director of marketing and communications for Text4Baby, says that while the service isn’t exclusively for low-income mothers, “We do put effort into [reaching them] and that includes women who are low-income, women who are African-American and Hispanic. We definitely have a target audience because we know where the need is the greatest, for one, and because of the infant mortality rate among ethnic groups.”
The National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition runs Text4Baby and collects no information from users beyond their zip code and the baby’s due date. It’s anonymous and easy to use for anyone with a cell phone — regardless of manufacturer.
Users can benefit from a number of special programs, such as a current promotion that offers free flu shots for all Text4Baby users at RiteAid.
Grider tells Duffy that the reminders help because lower-income people “have a lot to worry about. A lot of our moms who are low income or younger moms, for them it’s kind of like insurance: ‘I don’t know what I don’t know. But if I need to know something, Text4Baby is going to tell me.'”
It all adds up to a tech solution that is GR8 for low-income moms.
MORE: Where Helping the Poor Comes Before Innovating for the Privileged

A Technological Solution to Texting While Driving

Texting while driving has become such an insurmountable problem that even state laws ban phone use behind the wheel. In fact, more than nine people people are killed and an upwards of 1,060 people are injured in crashes involving distracted driving every single day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As more plugged-in generations get behind the wheel, safety advocates are realizing the importance of finding a solution to quell the texting-while-driving epidemic altogether.
Katasi, a Colorado-based startup supported by American Family Insurance, is one of those companies chasing the answer by developing technology to cut the plug. The system works with phone carriers to identify which one of their customers is driving and blocks the delivery of data and texts to that phone while it’s moving.
Founder Scott Tibbitts, a 57-year-old former chemical engineer, spent the last five years developing the technology and partnered with American Family Insurance and Sprint to get Katasi off the ground.
Tibbitts first struck an interest for the growing concern over distracted driving in 2008, when he arrived at a business meeting in Denver. Unfortunately, the executive he was meeting with had been killed in a car accident that morning involving a teenager who was texting, the New York Times reports.
The company’s product (dubbed the Groove) is a small box which connects to a socket beneath the steering wheel. The driver simply plugs it in, sends a text message to a provided number and incoming and outgoing distractions disappear.
Using a phone’s global positioning system (GPS), the car’s telematics (a telecommunications and mobility system that sends a wireless message that a car is moving) as well as other data points, Katasi’s algorithm determines who is behind the wheel. For instance, if a car belonging to a family is taking a trip from home to school, and both parents’ phones have been located at work while the child is in the car, the child has been identified as the driver, reports the New York Times.
But Katasi does have its limits. If all members are in the car, Katasi doesn’t typically block the messages, operating on the presumption that a passenger will stop the driver from texting, according to the Times.
The company is working with two phone carriers, including Sprint, and expects to launch with a to-be-determined anchor carrier next year, according to Katasi’s Indiegogo campaign.
With a rise in distracted driving-caused accidents and the growing dependency on smartphones, it’s important to see more companies focus on finding a way to end the texting-while-driving habit. Other tools include Text Ya Later, an app developed in Texas which answers incoming texts with an auto response.
But perhaps it’s about changing a culture of always being online, along with promoting attentive driving by mandating technology like Katasi and Text Ya Later that will ultimately make the roads a safer place.
MORE: Better Health Through…Texting?

For Those That Don’t Have Internet Access, This Tool Connects Brooklyn Residents and Leaders

It’s frustrating to feel like you don’t have an easy way to tell your elected officials what you think about various topics. But in Brooklyn, one graduate student is using a simpler method to help connect residents with local leaders and community organizations.
Earlier this year, Asher Novek created HeartGov, a texting platform that enables citizens to send a text to a private website that alerts government officials and community groups, who then can strike up a chat over questions or concerns.

“There’s something that’s different about getting a text message than an email,” Novek said. “It’s more personal, more conversational, like getting a response from friend or from family member.”

Texts messages are displayed as they are received and then organized by issue, urgency level and phone number, according to HeartGov’s site. Community leaders then answer questions through the site, which then sends out a response via text message, consolidating the conversation into a single SMS chat.

Novek hatched the idea as a part of his master’s thesis at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and began testing the service in March. He selected Brooklyn’s Flatbush, Crown Heights, Midwood and Prospect Heights neighborhoods to implement his tool because he felt they had lower levels of community engagement than other areas of Brooklyn.
Residents outside the zone can send in a text, but responses will come from local leaders in the selected areas. Some participants include Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, Council member Jumaane Williams, Community Board 14, Midwood Development Corporation, Flatbush Development Corporation, Flatbush Junction Business Improvement District and the nonprofit Heights and Hills, which serves Brooklyn’s elder residents.
Though the tool’s purpose seems a bit nebulous, Novek said he purposely created it to be open-ended, serving as an experiment for what residents might use it for. Envisioning it as a cross between 311 and Change.org, the platform is meant to encourage residents to inquire about anything from reporting potholes to requesting information on local public schools.
While more cities continue to march toward bringing locals online, Novek is aiming to reach the underserved population who are still on the other side of the digital divide. As of last year, an estimated 20 percent of Americans did not use Internet at home.
HeartGov was inspired by other simple mobile-based tools around the world, Novek said. He points to such examples as Ushahidi, a data management system that collected citizen reports on the ground via text message during Kenya’s 2007 election,  as well as UNICEF’s U-report, which promotes social mobilization and enables users to take surveys through text message. But in the U.S., Novek contends, developers skimmed over this type of tool to focus on web-based technology instead.
While he’s not certain of HeartGov’s future, Novek hopes to continue experimenting with how residents will leverage the tool to earn small wins. Ultimately, however, he wishes for big gains when it comes to community engagement.
MORE: Community-Owned Internet Access: How These Neighborhoods are Redesigning the Traditional Provider Model