Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/story-making-with-ipad-apps-baking-stories-in-the-21st-century/5022247/
Author Note: I focus on iPads and the Our Story app, but the patisserie metaphor is applicable to any other tablet or smartphone story-making application.Recently, there has been a call for researchers to adopt a balanced approach, which recognizes that new technologies bring about a step change in children’s learning, and that their influence depends on how, when, and most importantly, for what purpose, they are used (Flewitt, Messer, & Kucirkova, 2012; McPake, Plowman, & Stephen, 2012). Adopting the vision encapsulated in the NAEYC position statement that ‘technology and media offer opportunities to extend learning in early childhood settings in much the same way as other materials’ (NAEYC, 2013, p. 7), I have been researching the potential of new technologies to enrich the language and literacy development of preschool children and the role of teachers in this process. It is against this backdrop that I became interested in stories created and shared with new technologies, such as iPads and smartphones.
Stories created with these devices are, in comparison to traditional (or monomodal) story practices, innovative and transformative (Thomas, 2011). They respond to the needs brought about by the digitization of contemporary texts and images (Jewitt, 2005, 2008), and as such, foster children’s ...