In this paper, we discuss how iPads offer innovative opportunities for early literacy learning but also present challenges for teachers and children. We lent iPads to a Children's Centre nursery (3-to 4-year-olds), a primary school reception class (4-to 5-year-olds) and a Special School (7-to 13-year-olds), discussed their potential uses with staff in pre-and post-interviews and observed how they were integrated into practice over a two-month period. We found variability in the ways iPads were used across the settings, but a commonality was that well-planned; iPad-based literacy activities stimulated children's motivation and concentration. They also offered rich opportunities for communication, collaborative interaction, independent learning, and for children to achieve high levels of accomplishment. In some cases, this led teachers favourably to re-evaluate the children's literacy competence, and enabled children to construct positive images of themselves in the literacy classroom. Practitioners particularly valued the opportunities iPads afforded to deliver curriculum guidelines in new ways, and to familiarise all students with touch-screen technologies.

RosieFlewitt ESRC School of EducationUniversity of SouthamptonHighfieldSouthamptonSO17 1BJUK 023 8059 2756The recent foundation of a 'Young Children's Perspectives' special interest group in the European Early Childhood Education Research Association (EECERA) reflects a general move in social research towards the respectful and inclusive involvement of children in the research process. However, established education research guidelines often provide no more than a loose ethical framework, appearing to focus on avoiding poor ethical conduct rather than proposing ways forward for making children's participation in research a positive experience. This short paper draws on my own experiences of conducting ESRC-funded ethnographic video case studies on the ways four three-year-old children express their understandings at home and in a preschool playgroup during their first year of early years education. The paper reflects on the processes of negotiating initial and ongoing consent, problematises the notion of 'informed' consent in exploratory research with young children, and considers questions of anonymity when collecting and reporting on visual data. The paper proposes that by adopting a flexible, reflective stance, early years researchers can learn much from children, not only about their perspectives, but also about how to include young children in the research process.

This article reports on the use of video to collect dynamic visual data in education research and proposes that using visual technologies to collect data can give new insights into classroom interaction. Video data unveil how young children use the full range of material and bodily resources available to them to make and express meaning, forcing a reconsideration of Vygotskian accounts of the relationship between thought and language by producing grounded evidence for a pluralistic interpretation of the construction and negotiation of meaning. In addition to challenging language-biased approaches to classroom interaction, using video to collect data also forces a reexamination of established methodological practices. Drawing on data from ESRC-funded ethnographic video case studies of 3-year-old children communicating at home and in a preschool playgroup, this article discusses methodological and ethical dilemmas encountered in the collection and transcription, or representation, of dynamic visual data, arguing that visual data gives insights into aspects of communicative behaviour previously unaccounted for in early years education research.

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In this article I reflect on the insights that the well established traditions of ethnography can bring to the more recent analytic tools of multimodality in the investigation of early literacy practices. First, I consider the intersection between ethnography and multimodality, their compatibility and the tensions and ambivalences that arise from their potentially conflicting epistemological framings. Drawing on ESRC-funded case studies of three and four-year-old children’s experiences of literacy with printed and digital media,1 I then illustrate how an ethnographic toolkit that incorporates a social semiotic approach to multimodality can produce richly situated insights into the complexities of early literacy development in a digital age, and can inform socially and culturally sensitive theories of literacy as social practice (Street, 1984, 2008).