Lim, Fei Victor

Mobile devices have become increasingly ubiquitous in the contemporary communication landscape. Riding this trend, educational apps have proliferated the market, with many which claim to support and improve children’s learning and literacy development. Caregivers are often faced with the challenge of discerning the value of these educational apps and in choosing the appropriate apps for their children. In this paper, we discuss the development of a set of considerations to support caregivers in their curation of educational apps. This is done by performing a review of 28 past studies done on educational apps and synthesizing their findings to draw out common themes from the literature. These themes are then categorized into nine considerations in the form of guiding questions that caregivers can use to curate educational apps for their children’s digital play and learning. In the final part of our paper, we apply the set of considerations to three educational apps to demonstrate its utility.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the value of digital technology – in preserving work, play and learning – at a time when physical interactions are constrained. Given the challenges involved in the sudden conscription towards digital teaching and learning, the reception of both teachers and students towards the adoption of digital technologies for home-based teaching and learning has been mixed. While appreciating the affordances of digital technologies in supporting the continuity of teaching during the lockdowns, concerns have been raised by teachers on the effectiveness of digital learning. Our chapter discusses the teacher’s use of semiotic technologies to design learning experiences for students. From the perspective of design considerations, we explore the different ways of meaning making in digital learning – in particular, how knowledge can be represented, pedagogic relations expressed and learning organised through the affordances of semiotic technologies. We do this by studying three types of semiotic technologies, namely, the ubiquitous video lectures, digital games for learning and social media, specifically in its appropriation as a learning platform. Our chapter concludes by reflecting on losses and gains in digital learning and the need for teachers to expand their pedagogical repertoire in the post-pandemic education normal.

This paper explores the implications of youths’ out-of-school gaming practices for teaching and learning in formal and informal learning contexts. We report on a study where we examined the video game play of two youths using a case study approach. User experience approaches, e.g. the think-aloud protocol and interviews, were grounded in the theoretical framework of social semiotics to analyse the gameplay videos and to discuss the implications for the youths’ learning. The paper contends that youths are demonstrating critical thinking, empathy, and multimodal literacy through their gameplay. We offer suggestions for how adults can use video games for youths’ learning.