To effectively address early childhood screen time concerns raised by parents and policy makers it is important to examine the current home digital environments of young children. The present study draws upon research that examined the home digital environment of Australian parents and their children (aged 2 to 4; N = 69). Parents completed a…

Teachers' beliefs about what it is (or is not) possible to achieve with digital games in educational contexts will inevitably influence the decisions that they make about how, when, and for what specific purposes they will bring these games into their classrooms. They play a crucial role in both shaping and responding to the complex contextual…

Contemporary views of literacy, and of English and Language Arts curriculum recognise the importance of digital culture and communication forms in many young people's lives and the multiple forms of literacy students engage with as they work, interact and play. Amongst these, videogames, whether played on PCs, laptops, wiis, or on mobile devices…

The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) is one of the world's leading educational research centres. Since it was established in 1930, ACER has built a strong reputation as a provider of reliable support and expertise to education policymakers and professional practitioners. Each year, ACER is involved in a large number of research…

A digital disconnect perspective is founded on an assumption that technology use in the home is frequent, creative and generative, and that technology use in the early childhood centre should be the same as that found in the home. However, such arguments divert our attention from understanding the nature of the setting and thereby from an…

This study used qualitative methods to explore why some educators embrace the use of digital game-play (DGP) in the classroom. The results indicated that these teachers had a very strong belief that DGP could be beneficial for learning which stemmed from experiencing their own form of subjective success with using DGP in the classroom, availing…

The uptake of small screen technology by adolescents is widespread, particularly in industrial nations. Whether the same is true for Australian Aboriginal youth is less clear as there is a dearth of research in this regard. Therefore, in this exploratory study the use of small screen technology by Indigenous students was examined. Twenty-four…

The need for English and literacy curriculum to connect with young people's lifeworlds to build bridges and frames of reference that connect traditional English curriculum with digital texts and literacies, are increasing priorities in curriculum frameworks in Australia and elsewhere. This paper reports on a project in which the authors worked…

The way in which technologies support students with disability has been widely explored in recent times. Much of this research has focused on computer programs specifically designed to teach social and academic skills to students with disability. In the research reported in this paper we examined how students with disability could use technology…

This article outlines a model for teaching both computer games and videogames in the classroom for teachers. The model illustrates the connections between in-game actions and youth gaming culture. The article explains how the out-of-school knowledge building, creation and collaboration that occurs in gaming and gaming culture has an impact on…

In this paper we report on a study of the implementation of handheld game consoles (HGCs) in 10 Year four/five classrooms to develop student automaticity of mathematical calculations. The automaticity of mathematical calculations was compared for those students using the HGC and those being taught using traditional teaching methods. Over a school…

How to understand and argue for the nature and place of literary texts and experience in contemporary English curriculum has been and continues to be the subject of much debate. While literature as traditionally conceptualised remains an important presence in much English curriculum, the notion of what "literature" is, or what the…

In this paper we report some initial findings from our investigations into the Australian Government's Longitudinal Study of Australian Children dataset. It is revealed that the majority of Australian children are exceeding the government's Screen Time recommendations and that most of their screen time is spent as TV viewing, as opposed to video…

This paper will explore how game-play in video games as well as game centered approaches in physical education (PE) such as Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) can draw on complexity thinking to inform the learning process in physical education. Using the video game concept of game-as-teacher (Gee, 2007), ideas such as enabling constraints…

This study draws on a survey of 800 upper primary school students concerning their knowledge of certain 'new media' applications. The findings concur with other studies in suggesting that students' relationship with technology is more complex and nuanced than is conveyed by a simple branding of 'digital native'. Some differential experiences…