”I think it should be a little kind of exciting”: A technology-mediated story-making activity in early childhood education

The purpose of this study is to investigate what structuring resources for learning in practice children use in activities with digital story-making. According to the authors, structuring resources for learning in practice is what participants in an activity collaboratively produce to create meaning. In this study, structuring resources for learning in practice means different forms of verbal and non-verbal communication enabling children to explore and develop their literacy in social interactions.

The authors conclude that the app is a motivating tool for the children, despite the fact that the children sometimes find it difficult to operate the technology. The activity with digital story-making enables the children to reason and negotiate meaning on the basis of images in the app. The study indicates that technology-mediating story-making activities, where children collaborate on making a story, enable the children to engage in communicative interactions allowing them to explore language and develop higher-order thinking.

Overall, the results show that the task of telling a story using an app and the participating teacher constitute the primary structuring resources for learning in practice. The two children primarily use language to make their story. The children's communication of their story consists of several levels; from preparation and wording of the actual story to the transition from the oral narrative to the written, digital story. The two children use several different structuring resources for learning in practice while talking about what happens in the story they are making together. Among other things, they use play, the digital technology, a common narrative structure and their knowledge about the fairytale genre as well as their previous experience with narratives from other media, such as films, to negotiate the narrative content of the story, while looking at images on the app.

The study is an explorative case study including one preschool teacher and two 6-year-old children. Specifically, the study investigates how the two children communicate and interact with each other, while making a story using an online app developed to create stories using images. The two children were selected from a sample of 16 six-year-olds who were all observed while carrying out activities with digital story-making. Data was collected from a Swedish preschool class, primarily comprising children with Swedish as their first language. Since the preschool class was involved in a larger municipal project regarding reading and writing using digital technology, the children were already experienced users of computers and apps, and the preschool teacher in the study had been trained in using the Storybird app used in the study. The selected case/activity lasted around 35 minutes and was recorded on video with two cameras; one aimed at the computer screen and one aimed at the children's faces.

Skantz Åberg, E., Lantz-Andersson, A., & Pramling, N. (2016). ”I think it should be a little kind of exciting”: A technology-mediated story-making activity in early childhood education. I: Garvis, S., & Lemon, N. (red.), Understanding digital technologies and young children: An international perspective, 74-91. London: Routledge.