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Every day, we are surrounded by stories in print, on social media, in blogs, on the radio, and in stories from our friends and family. The ways people make meaning and communicate are increasingly multimodal and digital; yet, the preschool classroom, for all its multimodal learning, is sometimes devoid of technology. In this action research project, the authors integrated an iPad into a play‐based preschool classroom to support emergent literacy and playful storytelling. The students used multimodal and multi‐actor storytelling to collaborate, navigate their places in the classroom, and connect their school experiences to their home lives.

Although existing literature has established that technologies are utilized in play and can be supportive of learning, utilization of technologies in play-based classrooms is not commonplace. This study is an holistic examination of a successful 2-year process of integrating an iPad into a play-based preschool setting. Each year the use of the iPad increased, demonstrating its applicability in a play-based environment. This study adds to the existing research base by examining the confluence of actors in a play-based setting. As the iPad became a part of the classroom, new practices began to emerge as the children, teachers, and families began using it for their own purposes.

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Background/Context Over the last century, perhaps no school in American history has been studied more than John Dewey's Laboratory School at the University of Chicago (1896–1904). Scholars have published dozens of articles, books, essays, and assessments of a school that existed for only seven and a half years. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This article reviews the extensive firsthand accounts and historiography of the famed school. In the first section, the authors trace the published accounts of those who experienced the Dewey School firsthand between 1895 and 1904. In the second section, the authors review accounts of the school by contemporaries, reformers, and historians between 1904 and 2014, focusing on three historiographical areas: the events surrounding the closing of the school, the rationale underlying its curriculum, and the impact of the experiment on U.S. schools. In the third section, the authors argue that most accounts of the Dewey School convey one of three historiographical myths: the Dewey School as misunderstood; the Dewey School as triumph, and/or the Dewey School as tragedy. Research Design A historiographical essay is a narrative and analytical account of what has been written on a particular historical topic. Following this methodology, the authors are less concerned with establishing what happened at the Dewey School, than they were with how the school was analyzed and interpreted by contemporaries and historians over the past 120 years. Conclusions/Recommendations The authors analyze each myth to conclude that Dewey only subscribed to the myth of the Dewey School as misunderstood, while the other two were historiographical constructions created by Dewey's contemporaries and historians.