Abstract
Children's interactive e-books are novel literacy tools with interactive and multimodal representations of story contents and increased customizable features. The learning opportunities represented by these new affordances demand a thorough consideration of children's engagement, including the contextual and socio-cultural factors which influence the books' deployment in home and classroom settings. Currently, there is inconclusive evidence about how the affordances of interactive e-books support children's learning, with studies mostly limited to comparison studies with non-digital books and observational studies of children's immediate engagement. In both lines of research, the content of the stories, the overall context of interaction and the background of the interactants are neglected. This article makes recommendations for future research and highlights the value of iPads as a new medium enriching children's experiences but also challenging traditional research assumptions.
Highlights
Children’s interactive e-books are novel literacy tools with interactive and multimodal representations of story contents and increased customizable features
Children’s interactive e-books can be downloaded on several devices such as smartphones and tables. Those downloaded on iPads can be of two kinds: those created by the users themselves using any of the “book-making apps” available in App store (e.g., My StoryTM, Our Story) or “iPad storybooks” which are ready-made and can be downloaded from the ibook store (e.g., CinderellaTM, What is That?)
I focus on interactive e-books downloaded on iPads and subsume under the term “iPad books” books created with book-making iPad apps or those which are commercially available
Summary
Children’s interactive e-books are novel literacy tools with interactive and multimodal representations of story contents and increased customizable features. Considering these novel features and the increased popularity and growing industry of children’s iPad books (Costello, 2012), it seems important to research the books’ potential for supporting children’s learning and engagement with literacy. In the former approach, researchers have documented children’s engagement with a variety of iPad apps, including book-making (or story-making) apps in classrooms.
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