[Discuss] protecting kids online

[sronan at panix.com (Stephen Ronan)]

This is tangential, but I've wondered whether turning captions 
on for Netflix or YouTube would be likely to offer significant 
benefit for enhancing reading skills in 5-10 year olds who spend 
more time watching videos than reading books.

I'd be curious for any thoughts/experience list members have had.

I find a Google search for:
research on reading and captioning
produces a lot of seeming relevant results

Haven't gone through it yet, but the very first page
http://captionsforliteracy.org/learn.php
of the first item reads as below.
=====================
There is a large amount of research showing that captioned videos 
can help students of all ages improve their literacy. We've 
summarized some of it here. Links to abstracts have been provided 
in the citations.

Captioned video can help readers of all ages, from emerging 
readers1,2, to middle schoolers3, to adolescents9, to college 
students10, to adults4,5,7. It's especially helpful for those who 
are reading below their grade level2, who have learning 
disabilities6, or who are ESL/ELL students3,8.

Students report enjoying watching captioned videos6,7,9, so it's 
also a great way to motivate reluctant or struggling readers.

You don't have to use long videos or show a lot of them. Even 
watching short clips of captioned educational videos - ranging 
from 1.5 to 8 minutes long - every few days improved reading 
skills significantly1,3,6.

The specific areas that captioning can improve include word 
recognition, word comprehension, vocabulary, identifying the main 
idea of a story, phoneme recognition, listening comprehension, 
and oral reading skills1,2,3,4,6,8.

Captioning also helps students retain more of the concepts 
presented in the video3, take better notes10, and participate 
more in class discussions10, making it a great tool for teachers 
of any subject!

==============================

    -Stephen
p.s. as I recall for Netflix there's a little icon that appears 
in the top right somewhere when one hovers up there that lets you turn it 
on...