Abstract

During the last decade new technologies have been playing a major role in the lives of young children. The focus of this chapter is on how these new technologies are having a positive impact on children’s learning and development and how young children, ages 2 to 7, are making use of those technologies in different contexts. While some researchers have written about the negative impact of new technologies in early childhood (see Cordes & Miller, 2000), this chapter focuses on the positive aspects. To that end, we explore the use of new technologies in early childhood through the Positive Technological Development (PTD) framework (Bers, 2006; Bers, 2010). PTD is a natural extension of the computer literacy and technological fluency movements that have influenced the world of education (Pearson, Greg, Young, & Thomas, 2002), but it adds psychosocial, civic, and ethical components to the cognitive ones, which have a strong presence in the disciplines that study human development (Bers, 2008).