Research Article
Fei Victor Lim, Weimin Toh
CONT ED TECHNOLOGY, Volume 14, Issue 3, Article No: ep366
ABSTRACT
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.
Keywords: curation, digital learning, digital play, educational apps