'I think it should be a little kind of exciting': A technology-mediated story-making activity in early childhood education

In this chapter we study a pair of six-year-old children taking on the task of collaboratively making a story using a digital-story program named Storybird. The program allows children to choose images, thematically organised, as a basis for telling (and writing) a story. Theoretically, the study takes a sociocultural perspective on learning. From this point of view, the structuring resources utilised by the children in negotiating and producing their joint story are analysed. The results show that there are a number of structuring resources employed, facilitating and delimiting the children’s story-making, such as the children’s play, media and genre experience, what the teacher focuses on in the activity and the design of the software.

"The findings of this study imply that the instructional story-making activity is complex, with multiple things taking place at the same time that the girls need to relate to. In taking on the task, the children employ a series of structuring resources. However, it is the educational practice and the preschool teacher that become the overall structuring resources for the activity, together with the possibilities and constraints of the technologies. The story-making task off ers the children opportunities for reasoning and negotiating meaning mediated by the images provided by the software application. In addition to their language use, the girls employ or relate to the other structuring resources, such as patterns of play, awareness of the possibilities the technologies enable and genre knowledge, in managing the task." (Authors, 89)