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CoCreating interactive
CoCreating interactive
early education environments
early education environments
“The enthusiastic way children engage with digital imagery suggests a contemporary childhood lived through digital aesthetics and through intermingling ‘imaginary’, ‘experienced’, and ‘actual’ dimensionalities.”
“The enthusiastic way children engage with digital imagery suggests a contemporary childhood lived through digital aesthetics and through intermingling ‘imaginary’, ‘experienced’, and ‘actual’ dimensionalities.”
Linda Knight, Queenstown University in Australia
Linda Knight, Queenstown University in Australia
Multiple Modalities of Expression
Children make their thinking visible through
movement and art, language and expression, representation and imagination.
Technology offers another way for children to express what they think, feel, and experience.
"We think of technology as entering into every day, not dominating, not replacing, but mixing with other ways that children express their thinking. Technology becomes an element of the environment, rather than something to do. It is used as a language of childhood, supporting multimodalities of expression" (Reggio Children, 2020).
Use of these multimodalities of expression can enhance children’s learning and explorations. Tools that support digital engagement offer opportunities for children to express ideas in new ways and bring a different type of imagination to their play. In the combining of digital and physical environments, we explore how children act as authors and constructors of their own learning. We see how their individual and collective ideas can be enhanced and expanded in multiple modalities across physical and digital spaces. This type of Digital Humanities has the potential to transform teaching-learning contexts, offering children’s thoughts and theories in new formats.
Passive Technology
Passive Technology
Young children learn through engaging with the world. Historically engagement has focused on physical spaces in homes, schools, and communities. Traditional media, such as television has been replaced over the past two decades with digital media - apps, games, videos - on phones, tablets, and computers. Much of this technology - now including communication platforms such as Zoom - has common elements that reflect traditional screentime once found on TV's - passive engagement.
Interactive Media
Interactive Media
Interactive media is designed to facilitate active and creative learning by allowing children to control the medium and outcomes of the experience while encouraging children to discuss their digital actions and make real-life connections while building language skills and encouraging positive interactions. Interactive media is active while media that encourages following guidelines or viewing, such as an app is passive.
Multiple Modalities of Expression
Multiple Modalities of Expression
Combining physical and digital materials and tools invites children to explore their real and imagined words together. Digital tools (computers, tablets, projectors, etc.) are combined with materials that interact with light to extend children's ideas. These digital environments are combined with the physical materials of the classroom to create new languages of expression.
The National Association for the Education of Young Children and The Fred Rogers Institute created a 2012 position statement - Technology and Interactive Media - to provide guidelines for technology and digital media use to identify the difference between passive and active engagement. The Council of Europe offers International standards for young children with their - Council of Europe Strategy for the rights of the child (2016-2021).
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Research for the Website was made possible by a generous grant from the Caplan Foundation for Early Childhood.
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