Over the last several years, the compositions of young children have begun taking on a new form. Children create computer multimedia compositions including graphical images, sound files, text, motion, color, and scanned images. The use of computers for expressing ideas has become simply an additional medium. It might be said that computers have become another tool in children's crayon box. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 called for every classroom to be on the information highway by the year 2000.
Computers are in early childhood classrooms.
Early childhood professionals need to start asking what happens with these computers rather than should they be used in classrooms. It is important that we understand how children learn with computers as tools to learning. There is little research to assist us with understanding how children's emergent writing relates to computers. There is literature about children and writing with computers, but much of it focuses on the use of technology, not the children's building of understandings about writing. Usually the children's writing at the computer is examined in isolation.