We’re all seen the youtube videos made by parents showing off their toddler’s amazing technological skills. I don’t think a three-year-old’s ability to navigate an ipad is miraculous—the ipad is child sized with an intuitive platform. I am more interested in the possible differences in how a toddler uses and perceives such technology versus how an adult does. Omar Gallaga, who writes reviews of ipad picturebook apps for kids, does so in partnership with his three-year-old daughter Lilly. He recently shared with National Public Radio that he and his daughter do not always agree on what makes a good storybook app. Lilly wasn’t impressed with PopOut! The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the ipad’s pop-up version of the Beatrix Potter classic. Gallaga reviewed the Peter Rabbit storybook app highly and seems unable to explain why his daughter, who interacts with the app as she does with others, doesn’t favor it.
Adult and child perceptions of this ipad application clearly don’t coincide. This dissonance in perception leaves me with a lot of questions: I want to know what’s missing from the story reading experience for Lilly? What’s been added that interrupts the narrative for her? Does Lilly perceive a computer game rather than a storybook when interacting with some of these apps? How does her mind make distinctions between print and ipad storybooks? Without print literacy skills, how does a non-reading child classify differentiate between a print and an ipad picturebook? If ipad interaction is part of the future of child-parent reading and a common path to print and media literacy, research needs to be done to better understand how children perceive the technology. Knowing and understanding how toddlers and other non-readers perceive technology will help us to educate very young children in media literacy.
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