App Maps: Evaluating Children's iPad Software for 21st Century Literacy Learning

Abstract

In this chapter, we introduce a rubric and a map that we developed for comparing early childhood apps on five dimensions of participatory literacies: multiplayer, productive, multimodal, multilinear, and connected. Using exemplar data from our North American classroom studies on children’s technology play with iPads, we evaluate and compare four apps to illustrate how the rubric and map can be used to assess each app’s potential for develop ing participatory literacies. A description of each app and an ethnographic data excerpt illustrate how children used each app’s features to provide a sampling of the ways that young children actually engaged with the app during classroom play.