How to select tools for Digital Play in the Early Years?

This is an extract from my online PD for early childhood teachers on “How to support play based learning in early childhood education with digital technology”. You can join it as a stand-alone course for just $360 AUD or become a member of the ICT in Education Teacher Academy can pay just $43 AUD per month for all new and current online workshops for preschool teachers today.

As we are all surrounded by technological development and advancements today many of us including early childhood educators are aware that young children, having already been exposed to digital technologies, come to the doors of an early childhood centre with various degrees of expertise in using them.

It is for this reason that there is a general conception amongst these educators that they don’t need to know too much about what technologies exist for them and the technical competencies that is needed. They require the evidence based early childhood pedagogies that will make a difference with them in the learning environment.

Nevertheless, understanding what technology is best for digital play in the early childhood learning environment is important and, in the section, I will show you not only how to select ICT tools for early childhood education that are developmentally appropriate, but also provide you with some examples of what teachers have downloaded in the past.

What kinds of digital technologies are best?

We all live in a digitally rich and dominated society, so it is not surprising that the range of ICT tools and resources is constantly increasing. For you as an early childhood education practitioner, it means ensuring that young children are provided with a broad range of digital technology in early childhood education that reflects what children are seeing being used in their own communities.

Using Grown-up programs

It is always best to choose software, activities and games that are developmentally appropriate. Grown up programs can be included in your choices as they provide many ways for you to facilitate the use of software that will enable you to accomplish early learning goals.

This comes with the benefit that not only most of this software is freely available but is also generic and you may already have it. The other important aspect of this is that young children need to know how you use computers. On top of this fact is that you will be able to do a lot without purchasing expensive educational software for children.

Letting children see you type the weekly parent update in Microsoft Word and print out 20 copies of it is a great way to begin their learning journey. The digital play experience that you might set up for them could be perhaps a writing activity so the children could either dictate or type stories and notes to parents on Word and click Print to make their writing appear on paper.

Digital play in the early years can also go beyond such learning experiences with adult software. Further examples of how young children can play with Microsoft Word could include playing with the different fonts and sizes or with WordArt. The latest version of Word includes lots of other features such Icons, 3D models, drawing tools like that found in drawing and painting programs. I will get to this next!

An idea might be to let them dictate a story that you type in and then make all the Bs extra-large so the children can practice saying the B sound. This has great literacy and language development implications.

What about other Microsoft programs such as Excel? Well, you can use it to make lists and charts and graphs and change or add to them over a period of time.

Another example of digital play in the early years might include showing children how to do an Internet search for pictures. Think about letting them help you think of the keywords on a topic you are interested in looking up together. This kind of learning activity can be applied to play experiences such as ‘restaurant’ playing in one of their socio-dramatic play experiences. Play around with different keywords in the search engine to see if they will get more ideas.

A final advantage of such programs would be that they also aid in the development of Digital literacy in early childhood education. Most adult programs like the ones discussed are content-free and generic.

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