This book was a team effort from start to finish. A cast of colleagues at our institutions contributed in significant ways from the earliest days of planning meetings to hours and hours of interviews and site visits to the last bleary-eyed nights of final editing. We are especially indebted to Sarah Vaala, Anna Ly, and Lindsey Tepe, as well as Lori Takeuchi, Amber Levinson, Michelle Miller, Catherine Jhee, Olivia Ginn, Alan Tong, and Shayna Cook, who helped at critical times with strategic thinking, research, editing, blogging, and outreach. We are also very grateful for our partnership with HiredPen, a communications firm run by the forward-thinking and talented Barbara Ray and Sarah Jackson. Barbara, Sarah, and several of their writers, including Kathleen Costanza, Maureen Kelleher, and Heidi Moore, conducted interviews and reported for our pre–book launch blog, originally called Seeding Reading. Barbara spent many long hours traveling and directing our video shoots, and her storytelling expertise shone through at every turn. HiredPen's video crew, led by Nat Soti of Zero-One Productions, did a masterful job shooting video and weaving together the beautiful video vignettes that are sprinkled throughout the book.

Jeff Schoenberg of the Pritzker Children's Initiative saw the potential and promise of the ideas in this book many years before we had written the first sentence. We are incredibly thankful for Jeff's stewardship and smart critiques, and for the generous funding from J. B. and M. K. Pritzker and the Pritzker Children's Initiative that made this book possible. We will be forever indebted to Ralph Smith of the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, whose brainstorming sessions in early 2012 helped us see the significance of these issues. Funding from The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading and the Tides Foundation led to Pioneering Literacy in the Digital Wild West, the paper that sparked this book. We are also indebted to Jackie and Mike Bezos, Megan Wyatt of the Bezos Family Foundation, and Liz Simons, Deanna Gomby, and Holly Kreider of the Heising-Simons Foundation for their essential support of our teams' ongoing research on families' use of media.

We give special thanks to Marjorie McAneny, our editor at Wiley/Jossey-Bass, for her dedication to this project and for her smart insights in editing, and to our early manuscript editor, Sabrina Detlef, who did a masterful and careful edit of our first draft. Thanks too to Peter Gaughan who manages content development and assembly at Wiley/Jossey Bass for his wonderful strategic eye and critical comments, to Cathy Mallon for her fabulous project management skills, and to our most able copyeditor Pam Suwinsky. It is no easy job to edit and help sell a book with so many players and moving parts; we were so lucky to have them.

Dozens of people around the country gave of their time and energy toward this project by leading us to the right stories to tell or providing comments and critiques on early drafts. Special thanks go to Marilyn Jager Adams, Terri Clark, Yolie Flores, Ellen Galinsky, Roberta Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Lisa Kane, Susan Neuman, Conor Williams, and Kyle Zimmer, as well as the team at the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading: Lisa Kane, Yolie Flores, Susanne Sparks, Jessica Young, Kelly Trop, Lacy McAlister, and Daniel Bernick. For helping to set up the video shoots, which can require days of coordination, we thank Ana and Bonnie Blagojevic at Comienza en Casa at Mano en Mano in Milbridge, Maine; Ursula Johnson and Susan Landry at the Children's Learning Institute at the University of Texas; Ariel Kalil and Jill Gandhi at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago; Dan Weisberg and Tahra Tibbs at Innovations for Learning; Stephen Massey and Patti Miller at Too Small to Fail; and Paola Hernandez, Iveliesse Malave, and Bob Llamas at Univision. We also want to acknowledge thoughtful contributions from the advisory group on tech and literacy that we assembled through the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading: Terri Clark, Margaret Doughty, Mike Eggleston, Robert Gordon, Sandra Gutierrez, Ann Hanson, Joe Manko, Patti Miller, Tony Raden, Daryl Rothman, and Sheila Umberger.

We come from two different places, and both of our institutions strive to uncover and promote new ideas that will advance the well-being and development of all children, especially those from low-income families. That broader work at New America and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop has informed the ideas in this book and we are incredibly thankful for the philanthropic support behind it. At New America, the Education Policy Program's Early Education Initiative relies on generous support from the Alliance for Early Success, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, the Foundation for Child Development, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Pritzker Children's Initiative, the W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation, and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. At the Cooney Center we receive generous support for our research and core operations from Pete Peterson and Joan Ganz Cooney, Sesame Workshop, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Bezos Family Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, the Grable Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

Last, we say a big thank you to family and friends who inspired us and buoyed us through the years of this book-writing journey. Lisa thanks her mother and father, Betty Guernsey and Roger Guernsey, for their love and continual support; her friends Laura Dove, Sabrina Detlef, Allison O'Grady, and Luisa Tio for keeping her afloat when the going got rough; Kevin Carey, her director at New America, who gave her wide berth for research, writing, and exploration; Laura Bornfreund and her early ed colleagues at New America for making the Early Education Initiative shine when she was stuck in her book-writing cave; and her daughters Janelle and Gillian for their boundless energy, open minds, and agility with new technologies that inspire her to think in new ways and imagine what literacy could look like for future generations.

Michael thanks all of his colleagues who have encouraged him to write about digital media and learning, with special thanks to his colleagues and mentors Joan Ganz Cooney, Lloyd Morrisett, Gary Knell, Jeff Dunn, Lewis Bernstein, David Hamburg, and Vivien Stewart. He is also deeply indebted to his wonderful parents Marion and Irving Levine for their inspiration, encouragement, and keen commitment to educational change, his life partner Joni Blinderman for her unflagging support, passion for social justice, and all-around loveliness, and his children Sam, Zach, and Sarah for teaching him just about everything that is important to know about technology and parenting.