Mapping Apps: Looking for Playful Literacy Learning in the App Store

   photo: Luis Villa del Campo cc2.0                                                    

This week, Lisa Guensey and Michael Levine exposed the "confusion and disarray in the educational aisle of the App Stores", noting that "among free apps, more than 50 percent focused on teaching children to recognize the letters and sounds of the alphabet. Less than 10 percent of free apps focused on reading comprehension, and even rarer were skills like reading fluency (the ability to read without stumbling over certain words) and self-expression."  However, they also point out that the best-selling apps that parents buy tend to focus on simplistic reading rather than the creative literacy that educators most value. So what's going on here? 

In a forthcoming article, fellow literacy researcher Jennifer Rowsell and I look critically at apps to examine their underlying assumptions about learning. We found that rather than an educational definition of literacy based on reading research, an oversimplified and commonplace notion of reading is  operating here-- for both parent consumers and app developers. And oddly, it seems based on 20th century learning models of drill and memorization in flashy flashcards, ignoring the rich potential of 21st century literacies in touchscreen animation and digital media production.

Guernsey and Levine call for clear criteria to ensure educational apps truly promote learning that has relevance beyond the screen, such as literacy learning that is meaningful, authentic, and social. Toward that end, Jennifer Rowsell and I have developed a rubric and mapping tool to compare educational apps on key aspects of digital literacies, that move well beyond word and letter recognition. Importantly, these rating tools are grounded in our ethnographic research in which we closely observed children with a range of apps to see if and how deeply they engaged in literacy. The most engaging (and popular) literacy apps earned high ratings in all dimensions:  multiplayer activity that allowed children to play together but also to design their own content using image, sound, movement, and animation in open-ended play. Good apps, like good books, also engaged a learner's passion for learning more and could be shared on digital networks.

Technology Deserts and Other Imaginaries of Childhood

Notions of childhood morph as rapidly as the technologies that zip in and out of our daily lives in an endless stream of updates: 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and so on.  As early childhood teachers, our visions of childhood shape how we teach young children who are living immersed in rapidly shifting technologies, literacies, and global innovation. Our teacher imaginaries about childhood cause us to offer one literacy to children while making another technology-based literacy off-limits. On one hand, visions of developmentally appropriate practice privilege “natural” materials, creating oases in our classrooms from a daily barrage of popular media and glowing screens. On the other hand, a vision of young children as "digital natives" and teachers as "technology laggards" blames teachers for turning the early childhood education landscape into a widespread technology desert. 

However if we recognize that our imaginaries of childhood are dynamic and negotiated ideas, we can open up possibilities to look critically at these visions, question our assumptions, and reconsider ways of doing things. We can question:

• Can technoliteracies be compatible with developmentally appropriate approaches? Can we argue for digital play spaces as not only appropriate but necessary? 
• Can we retool an "all-natural" and "commercial-free" classroom to support children's actual popular media knowledge, literacy resources, and technological repertoires? 
• Do our own assumptions and reluctance to provide experiences with technology in early childhood education perpetuate ongoing digital inequities built upon economic and gender disparity? 
• Or are early childhood teachers being blamed as technology laggards when the real issue is under-resourced classrooms and over-stretched budgets unable to afford up-to-date iPads and touchscreens?

Digital toys and tools are expensive and out of reach for many families as well as for many early childhood classrooms.  A financial divide separates not only have and have-not households but also early education centers--doubly discouraging as schools are the key site for ensuring equitable and regular access to new literacies for all children.  Recently in Literacy Playshop workshops, I've talked with many preschool teachers excited to try apps, iPads, and filmmaking with young children. Their faces fall when they discover the price of tablets; even the $100 for the now-discontinued  Flip cam would be out-of-reach. These dedicated preschool teachers who fund so much of their curriculum out of their own pockets have no idea how to find the money to bring digital tools into their classrooms. In these cases, we are asking all the wrong questions. The root of technology deserts in early childhood education is not teacher resistance based on a romantic vision of natural child but the pernicious and systemic under-funding of early childhood education.  

How will you use ebooks in your classroom?

Here's an interesting discussion with an embedded YouTube video demonstrating how children's books might work on iPads.