Come and play ... on baby’s iPod

On Sept. 18, the Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind “Sesame Street,” launched the first in a series of video podcasts available for free download on iTunes. It was an instant success. Think painful supermarket moments, noisy dentist office moments and embarrassing restaurant moments: Mom or Dad whips out the iPod. Baby pacified. Baby learning!

In one week, the podcast became the most downloaded video on the site and, three weeks and two more podcasts later, “Sesame Street” is still at No. 1.

“I loved this short show for my 2yr old it worked to keep her still while I had a Dr’s appt,” wrote Noemi05 on the iTunes comments section.

“God Bless Sesame St,” crowed Jpooh88 in the same section. “. . . This is technology for the GOOD!”

Over at the Sesame Workshop, the children’s education experts are pleased, if not entirely surprised. “We thought it would work,” said Glenda Ravelle, vice president for research and creative development and digital media at Sesame Workshop. “Parents and kids have such busy lives these days, there just isn’t that much time in anyone’s daily routine to sit and watch television. If we can get this to them in a form they can use whenever they have a spare moment together, they will use it and we have a better chance of kids learning.”

“We live in an on-demand world, and everyone is having to adjust,” said Sesame Workshop Chief Executive Garry Knell. “There is a revolution in media, and ‘Sesame Street’ in this sense is no different from anyone else.”

The podcast is not the first time the Sesame Workshop has experimented with making Sesame Street content mobile. Two years ago, Ravelle and her team got a grant from PBS and the Department of Education to create a literacy series that parents could get on their cellphones. They came up with an eight-week package divided into 26 segments -- one for each letter of the alphabet.

Three or four times a week, parents participating in the study got a voice message from the “Sesame Street” character Maria (yes, she’s still around!) with suggestions on how to get their kid thinking about the letter A. Then the parent could hand the phone to the child, who could listen to a voicemail from Elmo with a message about the letter A. A video from “Sesame Street” about the letter A was sent directly to the cellphone too.

“It was very successful,” said Ravelle. “They found that the majority of parents in the study engaged in more literacy activities with their kids and reported that their kids learned several letters during those eight weeks and that it led to a more general interest in letters.”

The key, Ravelle said, is that when the content is short and mobile, parents and kids are more likely to watch together. “There’s lots of research, not only ours, that children learn more from watching educational television if they have a parent there to help them interpret and process what is going on in the show,” she said. “That is one of the exciting things we found when we did the cellphone research. There was much more co-viewing.”

For the podcast segments, Sesame Workshop selected a new feature called “Word on the Street” that was created for the current season of “Sesame Street” to help preschoolers build vocabulary. In typical “Sesame Street” fashion, the five-minute clip is broken into even shorter segments. The podcast on the word “dog” has talk-show host Conan O’Brien explaining how different dogs bark (then drinking from his water cup like a dog) as well as a pattern game of dogs and babies drawn by Keith Haring.

The “newspaper” podcast has newsman Matt Lauer describing the different sections of the newspaper and then saying that his favorite thing to do with the newspaper is to make a paper hat, which he then wears. There is also a segment in which Grover learns that newspapers aren’t just good for making paper hats but can also tell you what’s happening in the world around you.

The Sesame Workshop will continue to roll out the “Word on the Street” segments on iTunes until they run out of them, and then they will move on to another program that they have not yet determined. They have also started to put clips from the old “Electric Company” on iTunes as well. And for the obvious question, asked a couple of times on the comment section of iTunes and here by All-American Rejects Master, “Lol what the heck?? Dude why would a two-year-old have an iPod rofl!!!” The answer is, most of them don’t. (At least not yet.)

But parents do, and as Cure_CF-for_Kai wrote in a post titled “2 Year Old With iPod”: “Invariably, being the mom of a 2 year old and a 9 year old I have come to realize that what is mine, is not mine but theirs too. Nothing is sacred if it’s seen in your hand or pocket all the time. So, my 2 year old has an iPod.”