South Africa has low literacy levels and teachers face multiple challenges in their endeavours to elevate levels of literacy. This is especially prevalent in rural and township schools where teachers face the additional challenges of isolation, limited resources and access to professional development. This article reports on the findings and…

Play is essential to the healthy growth and development of children. As children play, they explore new roles, try out new ideas, and bond with each other. Play increases language, cognitive, and social skills. How can the power of play be harnessed and shaped for educational purposes? How can teachers infuse play into the classroom to improve…

While mobile devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous (even in low-income families in the United States) and are being used for educational purposes, it is unclear how these technological tools may benefit letter learning (a foundational precursor to early literacy achievement) in preschool children. To contribute clarity, this study tested…

Technology is gaining more and more place in our classrooms today, making its investigation more relevant than ever. Therefore, the author of this paper aimed to explore the role and impact of technology on students reading. To do so, the author has examined several aspects related to the use of technology for teaching and learning, including how…

Augmented reality (AR) is predicted to be one of the driving forces in education over the next five years. However, the success of this technology depends on the intelligent design of the apps. This research investigated commercially available augmented reality picture books to survey their digital features interactive features. The researchers…

Technology-based interventions have been used to improve reading skills for students with reading difficulties. Thus, many literature reviews and meta-analyses have investigated the effectiveness of this type of intervention; however, constant changes in the technology field make it important to review the most recent studies and how these studies…

Young children today are gaining access to a dizzying array of apps, games, and videos. With all of this digital media at their fingertips, two urgent questions have emerged in preschools and elementary schools: Could technology interfere with the way children learn to read? Or could it help? While questions continue to arise about the challenges…

Interactive app books are increasingly part of young children's literacy ecosystem. However, most previous studies examined buddy reading with traditional print books or CD-ROM books. Little is known about whether and how buddy reading with app books might be related to subsequent individual reading. To address this, informed by multimodal…

GALL (Google Assisted Language Learning) refers to Google as a collaborative and communicative tool that supports online and blended language learning. This research paper presents an overview of previous studies on using Google Apps in the process of learning and teaching of English language. A systematic search on ERIC digital library and Google…

This work investigates in how far gamification and micro-learning, implemented by the novel technologies H5P and xAPI, are suitable to increase the motivation and learning performance of pupils with cognitive and behavioral challenges. The context for the field trials is the Norwegian SOL framework (short for Systematic Observation of Reading) in…

As portable devices become increasingly available in elementary classrooms teachers are expected to use these new technologies to engage students in both traditional print-based literacy learning and digital literacies practices, such as multimodal composing. Teachers face the daunting task of integrating apps into their current research-based…

For over two decades, the field of children's literature has been incorporating more digital technologies into publication of and access to texts. From early computer and CD-ROM adaptations of print picturebooks to the extensive visual and aural interactivity of the newest literature apps, what and how children read has changed significantly in…

This study employs a sequential multiple assignment randomized trial (SMART) design to develop an adaptive intervention with personalized print and digital content for kindergarten to Grade 2 children (n = 273). In Stage 1, we ask whether it is better for children to receive an adaptive intervention based on (a) 10 conceptually coherent texts or…

There is a wide range in the educational qualities and overall quality of interactive storybook apps for tablet computers (ebooks). Minimally, ebooks for young children present illustrations on a screen, accompanied by an oral reading of the text. Today's ebooks can also include animation, zooming in and out, musical scores, sound effects,…

Beginning with a brief rationale for selecting quality digital picture book apps for beginning readers, the authors describe the elements of digital picture books and provide a brief review of the instructional benefits of digital picture book use for beginning readers. They then present a detailed taxonomy for selecting quality picture book apps.…