How you can best define and determine digital fluency in preschool today?

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As you teach digital literacy skills in early childhood education, it is important to pause and reflect on what it actually means to be digitally literate or digitally fluent in the early childhood learning environment. This is important as today in countries like Australia, there is a national imperative behind the embedding of ICT in early childhood education. These young learners need to develop digital literacy skills that they will need to carry through the schooling system and into the world beyond school.

So, where do you start? Who is lagging behind in exposure to digital technologies? The digital divide has a lot to answer for, but it is your duty to understand that many children do enter your doors with various degrees of exposure to digital technology and have various degrees of capabilities.

While we might not associate ‘digital fluency’ with early childhood education, it is important that we view young children’s learning outcomes in digital technologies in this way. In this section, I will show you the skills and experiences can learn while you are integrating digital technology in early childhood education.

What makes young children so digitally fluent?

Digital technologies are becoming more embedded and ubiquitous in the environment around children and they are having a profound effect on all aspects of people’s lives, including young children, that they are now being ‘taken for granted’.

Yet, it is highly likely that digital technologies and ICT will continue to be a significant presence in children’s learning environments.

Today, even the youngest children appear ready and willing to embrace a digital future and so it our jobs as adults and educators to guide them appropriately. Children are not simply ‘born to learn’ but are born “predisposed to take advantage of the learning technology can offer even before they can read, write and make themselves verbally understood” (FirstDiscoverers, 2022).

As we as adults continue to take advantage of digital technologies ourselves young children will continue to take their most important cues from what we do with it rather than what we say so.

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What can children learn through digital play?

According to research (Plowman, 2020 as cited in The Education Hub, 2020), the learning outcomes achieved are similar to that of traditional play and include problem-solving, creativity and imagination. However, with the successful integration of digital technology in early childhood education you can provide some unique learning opportunities. Some examples might include exploring concepts such as floating in space or exploring under the sea. Children when being creative can achieve things such as creating new hair styles using digital devices.

This was proven in a study in the UK (Marsh et. al., 2018, as cited in The Education Hub,2020) of a group of children who played with tablet computers at home individually. It found examples of social and socio-dramatic play, creative play, language play, exploratory play, mastery play and fantasy play.

There are four main areas of potential learning from digital play experiences that include:

• Operational skills for learning how to control and use technologies;
• Dispositional learning such as learning to concentrate, persist and developing a sense of oneself as competent and capable, as well as developing exploratory, inquiry-based approaches to learning;
• Socioemotional learning, including learning to share, communicate and manage emotions and;
• Knowledge and understanding of the world through finding out about people, places and things in the wider world, as well as understanding of the role of technology in everyday life.

(The Education Hub, 2022)

It is also important to understand that the integration of digital technology in early childhood education and primary school can also enhance mathematical learning along with promoting children’s engagement, collaboration and the development of digital literacy. This is in addition to also supporting children’s emergent literacy as now they can use digital devices to create digital stories and extended narratives, and convey information and ideas to others.

Finally, research has also shown how the use of digital technologies can help young children develop the technological multiliteracies that is likely to be important to them in the future.

When discussing digital fluency or digital literacy in early childhood education it is important to understand that it is comprised of two specific characteristics – skills and experiences.

In terms of skills, these are the concrete learnings of actual abilities. For example, it might be learning how to use a digital camera but on the other hand, the experiences are more complex as they are the actual uses of digital technologies and their educational applications such as how they enhance writing development or literacy skills.

 See a list of skills here >>>