Let’s Get Personal- with Apps That Facilitate Children’s Digital Literacy Involvement, That Is!

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Children are often more motivated to read and write when what they are reading and writing is personalized (Oulasvirta & Bloom, 2008). A key component of personalization is agency, or a student’s ability to partially control/make decisions related to learning experiences. We often turn to traditional paper and pencil book creation when aiming to incorporate students’ personal interests, cultures and experiences, and it is well documented that the benefits of this practice extend beyond literacy skills to include increased self-confidence (Kucirkova, 2016).  Digital literacy apps, however, also provide students with a multitude of agentive opportunities thought to enhance literacy motivation. Professor Natalia Kucurkova (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) highlighted the following two promising apps in a recent article published in Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood:

  1. Cinderella app (by Nosy CrowTM): This award-winning app allows children of all ages to participate in the story of Cinderella by including three different modes (“Read to Me”, “Read by Myself” and “Read and Play”). The app encourages personalization by permitting children to move the characters around and take their own selfie which can then be embedded into the story.  
  2. Our StoryTM app (by Open University): This app developed in collaboration with child psychologists allows young authors to upload existing photographs or choose from a bank of pre-existing pictures when creating digital texts of any genre. Children can record a dictation to accompany each page and/or enter text.  Saved works can be revised at any time and shared via email or social media.

Do you have experience using the above apps or similar ones in your classroom? We would love to hear from you about your students’ digitally agentive literacy endeavors!

Kucirkova, N. (2016). Personalisation: A theoretical possibility to reinvigorate children's interest in storybook reading and facilitate greater book diversity. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(3), 304-316.

Oulasvirta, A., & Blom, J. (2008). Motivations in personalisation behaviour. Interacting with Computers, 20(1), 1-16. doi:10.1016/j.intcom.2007.06.002

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