Learning and Leading

Meghan McCarthy Welch and Caitlin McMunn Dooley
Are Your Students Really
Taking students beyond interaction to full participation can help them get the

Students 8 and younger have ac- cess to screens everywhere—on smartphones, tablets, handheld games, and laptops, to name just a few places. But how do you know if students are using these tools effectively? Are your students participating in digital environments in ways that encourage critical thinking, active engagement, and contribution, or are they simply passive consumers? Are they using tools that support their development, or are they trying to use tools that weren’t designed for them?

These questions highlight why it is important to make a distinction between interaction and participation. Apps, software, handheld games, websites, and even TV shows have the potential to be interactive. If a tool elicits a simple response or input, it is interactive. Many online games prompt children to select a correct answer by clicking on a choice or typing a correct letter to finish a word. These question/response games encourage interaction, but participation goes a step further.

Meaningful and equitable participa-
tion with digital tools happens when
students are part of a conversation.
It means that they not only receive
information from a screen, but also
create and contribute their own in-
terpretations. Instead of just being
able to answer a simple question, a
student is able to create something—
for example, a picture or a text—
that elicits unique responses from the
tool or an audience that the tool sup-
ports through comments, interactive
could respond again, and the tool or
audience would respond accordingly.
The student could respond to other
pictures or texts and receive feedback
on his or her own. This kind of back-
and-forth participation is what can
happen with well-designed tools.

Starfall.com is a popular site that educators use for early readers. Because games and information on the site ask only for simple responses without the opportunity to contribute or receive feedback, Starfall.com would be a Q1 digital tool.