A qualitative approach to data analysis was used to track and codify the visual choices made by the child photographers. Children’s science experience was viewed through a multimodal, social semiotic lens. This paper presents initial findings from a project that explored the use of digital cameras by preschool children in classroom science investigations. Based on these results, we discuss implications for meaningful technology integration in early childhood education. Furthermore, the journals illustrated children's complex and varied types of cognitive and social reflections. In the process, the children meaningfully integrated technology into their classroom activities, as well as transformed the nature of the social space surrounding the computer where children created their journals. Results reveal that when students took pictures, they successfully negotiated their dual roles of photographer and participant in other activities. Ethnographic video data, field notes, and student journals were examined using a grounded theory approach. These students used a digital camera to document their daily school activities and created digital photo journals to represent their experiences. To explore meaningful and effective technology integration in early childhood education, we investigated how kindergarten–first-grade students created and employed digital photography journals to support social and cognitive reflection. It suggests that actor-network theory may offer a way of conceptualizing young children’s engagement with digital texts in new ways. The article concludes by arguing that there is a need for more extensive exploratory research in this field, which considers how digital practices within educational settings relate to other dimensions of children’s literacy learning, in order to better understand how new technologies are and could be contributing to children’s literacy within educational settings.
Following this, aspects of actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) are used to consider other ways that technology and children may be ‘acting upon’ literacy in educational settings through recontexualizing meanings from other domains. The article begins by exploring the different assumptions about the role of digital texts that underpin the studies considered, identifying three loose categories of studies which position technology as: deliverer of literacy site for interaction around texts and medium for meaning-making. I was surviving, but I sure as hell wasn’t thriving.This literature review provides an overview of research into technology and literacy for children aged 0-8 in educational settings from 2003-2009. I’d been stuck, like a hamster on a wheel - running round, and round, and round, but never quite getting anywhere.
And I realised my way of working (and living) was just not sustainable.
I was putting so much into my business to keep it afloat, that when it came to anything outside of that. So that’s exactly what I did, and after years of sacrifices (think: missing birthdays and weddings, and losing friends as a result!), I finally achieved every goal on my list… I had a house, a pension, and was earning up to the threshold of £87k. However, I soon realised that if I wanted to achieve my grandiose goals, I was going to have to work, and I was going to have to work HARD. So, when I left university feeling like the world was my oyster, I set out to move behind the camera and build my own photography business. I was lost and confused, and every shoot took me a little bit further away from who I really was. My journey began in front of the camera, and as much as I’d like to say it was a happy time - if I’m honest, it wasn’t.