In her reflection article "By-passing the debate: beyond the 'technology question' in the early years", Prof Edwards convincingly argues the case that to understand the role of new technologies for young children's education, we need to put an end to the endless propaganda arguments advanced by techno-sceptics and techno-enthusiasts and look at the how and what children learn as they use a variety of technologies in home and school communities.

This paper is concerned with a so far little explored situational context: sharing books which have been personalised for individual children in a pre-school. Thirty-five children (mean age 36.94 months) were read a book with a personalised and non-personalised part. Their spontaneous verbal responses were video recorded and later transcribed. The analysis focused on the difference between the personalised and non-personalised context in terms of the amount of children's utterances and the pragmatic intent of their speech, which included self-referencing, use of questions and corrections. The findings are interpreted from both developmental and socio-cultural Vygotskian perspectives, and evaluated in light of their implications for the understanding of pragmatic aspects of sharing personalised books with children.

Emerging research and everyday reality show how very younger and younger children are becoming 'iPad-literate'. From the press and media, we hear a lot of promise about the fun and creativity iPads can foster, and how they can open new horizons for children. Touch-screen feels nothing like pen or pencil, it shines, it glides, it has a special 'feel'. No wonder then that millions of parents have jumped on the "iPad bandwagon" and thousands of schools across the world now use tablets in their classrooms.

The last 5 years have been marked by an explosion of tablet and smartphone applications designed for young children and several calls to encourage educational researchers to engage in children's app research. This paper presents a novel prospect for educational researchers: to collaboratively research, implement and produce iPad apps for educational purposes. Based on the author's own research as well as that of others, an original framework “Research, Practice and Design framework” (iRPD) for guiding such collaborative efforts is provided, along with five key principles: triple collaboration, shared epistemology, awareness of affordances and interconnected social factors, and child-centred pedagogy. The novel affordances of collaboratively produced iPad apps for educational design-based research are outlined, along with several examples of how such an engagement might enrich educational research and the app landscape.

Since the early 2010s, there has been a proliferation of new platforms for children’s stories (e.g., storyapps or ibooks), but not necessarily greater diversity of story content or children’s greater interest in reading. This paper argues for a new approach to address the apparent paradox of a wider availability of children’s literature combined with children’s eroded reading interest. The issue is suggested to be addressed by considering the agency and aesthetic dimensions which lie at the heart of personalisation theory (Cordova & Lepper, 1996; Oulasvirta & Blom, 2008). Translating agency into reading practice means establishing children’s early authoring, which can result in an eclectic approach to content and increased reading motivation, as long as children’s aesthetic choices are fully supported. However, it is also argued that early authoring should not be conflated with achieving an overly child-centred literature which would ignore the reciprocity dimension of community and society relations. Digital book-making is suggested to offer original concepts which might provide an alternative approach for future work in the area of early authoring.

This study is the first to systematically investigate the influence of child gender and age, on parents’ perceptions of UK children's digital media use at home. It provides an in-depth exploration of how children's age and gender influence the balance between children's use of digital and non-digital media at home. The data draw on 709 parents’ responses to an open-ended question asked in the context of a national survey investigating the digital reading habits of children, conducted in 2015. Parents’ responses were analysed using content and thematic analysis, which yielded eight main categories, collapsed into three major themes: control, child's healthy development and diversity of experiences. Quantitative analyses evidenced that more parents of boys were concerned about the health implications of their children's digital media use and this was a concern especially for parents of the youngest (0–2-year-old) children. More parents of 6–8-year olds cited the appeal of technology as the main reason for the perceived imbalance in their children's engagement with digital media. The study provides a more secure understanding of the factors that influence parental perceptions of their children's digital media use at home, which has implications for policy-makers, digital designers and early years professionals.

Personalised learning, having seen both surges and declines in popularity over the past few decades, is once again enjoying a resurgence. Examples include digital resources tailored to a particular learner's needs, or individual feedback on a student's assessed work. In addition, personalised technology-enhanced learning (TEL) now seems to be attracting interest from philanthropists and venture capitalists indicating a new level of enthusiasm for the area and a potential growth industry. However, these industries may be driven by profit rather than pedagogy, and hence it is vital these new developments are informed by relevant, evidence-based research. For many people, personalised learning is an ambiguous and even loaded term that promises much but does not always deliver. This paper provides an in-depth and critical review and synthesis of how personalisation has been represented in the literature since 2000, with a particular focus on TEL. We examine the reasons why personalised learning can be beneficial and examine how TEL can contribute to this. We also unpack how personalisation can contribute to more effective learning. Lastly, we examine the limitations of personalised learning and discuss the potential impacts on wider stakeholders.

Contemporary research suggests there are many missed opportunities for home and school to work together to define and promote effective practices with digital technologies, especially in early years. This study outlines ways in which one Early Years classroom creatively promoted bidirectional connections between children's learning with technologies at home and in school. Nested in a posthumanist perspective on space and classroomness , the study illuminates the complex spatial entanglement among home, school and technologies in the form of enhanced vignettes. As a space-based interpretive case study that emerged from a larger project, the data collection methods revolved around a set of two visits by each researcher, one year apart, plus analyses of school documentation and online interactions. We integrate diverse data sources to argue that innovative, multimodal practices of teaching, learning and assessment can be designed and implemented imaginatively, deploying a range of digital technologies to connect with children's and parents' home lives. Use of multimedia affordances of technologies, attention to children's physical and material interactions with resources and strategic school policy made it possible for influences to percolate between home and school, to the enhancement of children's learning in the moment.

Kucirkova, N. & Flewitt, R. (2018) The future-gazing potential of digital personalisation in young  children’s reading: views from education professionals and app designers, Early Child Development and Care. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2018.1458718

In the past five years, there have been significant changes concerning the material and design properties of digital books, with an impact on children's enjoyment and learning from reading on screen. Despite the rapid advances in technology, research on children's digital books is disjointed. This is because of no consistent approach to the study of interactivity, an undertheorized relationship between print and digital books, and a binary design focused on either learning or playful engagement with digital books. Drawing on the discourse reminiscent of digital game designers, some developers, scholars and professionals celebrate interactivity in digital books as a possibility to motivate and engage children in reading, while a body of experimental research documents the negative impact of interactivity on children's story comprehension and vocabulary learning. This article presents an integrative framework based on a comprehensive literature review and a content review of the hundred most popular children's digital interactive books. The framework offers 1, methodological guidance and a definition of interactivity based on five key categories; 2, theoretical guidance based on the third space theory and 3, innovative design and evaluation models based on a 'method assemblage'. As such, the integrative framework provides new tools and perspectives to advance the field of children's digital books.

This paper discusses the pedagogical practice of developing reading for pleasure in pre-schools and primary phase settings through the lens of one key dimension of 21 st century reading: personalisation. We draw on a series of studies and examples to identify, address and problematise human-and digitally-mediated personalised reading for pleasure. Through a content analysis of the key features of current digital library systems, we show how these