Toys or Tools?: Educators' Use of Tablet Applications to Empower Young Students Through Open-Ended Literacy Learning

Introduction

This chapter will report on a research study that is examining teachers’ experiences using an open-ended tablet application to support young children’s early literacy skills (aged 3-6 years). The findings reported here reflect the first year of the study’s implementation during the 2015-2016 school year. The study is expected to take place over 3 years.

Early findings indicate that all children can experience an increased level of empowerment through the use of mobile digital technologies. This sense of empowerment applies to a wide range of children including those with special learning needs, English Language Learners, and those who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Benefits were also noted for young children’s early literacy learning outcomes as they became the creators and producers of knowledge in multimodal ways. This chapter will report on three case studies to highlight examples of empowerment that arose through the development of literacy knowledge, skills, and dispositions while children employed an open-ended tablet application.

While the kindergarten educators came to believe that the mobile technology employed in the study was empowering for their students, they identified several challenges early in its implementation. This chapter will outline these challenges, but also the strategies that enabled the teachers to manage these hurdles. These strategies and the observed benefits of the mobile technology for young children’s early literacy development will support recommendations for classroom practice and future research.