KidCitizen Annual Use Report 2018

Greetings KidCitizen community! We are honored by your interest in KidCitizen this, year and hope it has been helpful to you in your work with young children and primary sources. This work is important: children learning that social studies is an interpretive and evidence-based area of inquiry – that lays a foundation for how kids can tackle understanding themselves and their world.

We launched KidCitizen at the end of November 2017, so 2018 was our first year, and we are very happy with the way it went. Keeping to a small team and tight budget, we did not do much promotion: our growth came organically through you all spreading the word, and our work with the wonderful Teaching with Primary Sources consortium at the Library of Congress.

Here’s our report on how and where KidCitizen has been used in 2018!

Visitors from all 50 States!

And teacher guides downloaded in 178 congressional districts across 39 states. (We don’t ask teachers or users to sign in, but people can volunteer to tell us their zip code when they download a teachers guide.)

KidCitizen Episodes Played

The six KidCitizen episodes were played over 11,500 times in 2018. We built up strong use through the spring, things calmed down in the summer, and then fall 2018 so the most use yet. (Spoiler alert: use in spring 2019 going well…)

Which Episodes are most popular?

Glad you asked! As you can see in the graphic below, it’s changed over the course of the year. The introductory “What are Primary Sources” started out on top, but over the year both “Welcome to Congress”, “Community Helpers” and “Congress and Child Labor” caught up with and passed it.

The KidCitizen Editor

We had over 100 teachers sign up for the KidCitizen Editor, which is encouraging.  We are working on a webinar program to help those teachers create – stay tuned for more on that.

Geeking Out: What devices, operating systems?

Looking at our traffic, laptops and desktops still rule, though mobile and tablets together are 18%. Windows is number 1, Macs 2, and Chromebooks 3. The good news is KidCitizen works fine across all of them (and Android and iOS too.) And we had very few tech support issues.

2019 Plans

We’re working on new episodes, professional development (check out the KidCitizen page at the TPS Teachers Network!) and research… More on that in a later post.

Thanks, the KidCitizen Team.