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Can ICT really help children in the pre-school environment? It's so often a given that computers are 'good' and 'educational' that it's sometimes worth standing back to challenge this assumption.

There's at least some evidence that, in the semi-formal educational environment of the nursery or reception class, ICT is failing to deliver. Dr Lydia Plowman from the Institute of Education at Stirling University, who studies young children's use of technology and its impact in the pre-school environment, agrees: "The focus on computers is misplaced to the extent that the classic desktop is poorly designed for the nursery or reception class environment - it's designed for adults, for individual use and for use in a work context. It's also designed for static use. And while there's been great improvement in the software and how it's designed, generally using it is not a stimulating enough experience for the child - it can be boring, even. Young children should be able to learn through play, with technology as well as without it.

"It's a challenge to see how this could be more fun than the sandpit or water play unless there's greater encouragement for helpers and nursery nurses to be more active guides and participants in the experience."

Part of the problem is that adults in nurseries sometimes suffer from a lack of training and motivation to fully exploit the ICT available. The result: by sticking to a rigid concept of what technology is, its tangible and haptic (tactile) appeal never gets invoked. Plowman adds: "Pre-school practitioners tend to assume that 'ICT equals computers' and don't tend to question that assumption. This is understandable as they still do not receive sufficient professional development opportunities in the area of ICT. This focus on computers can be limiting, and our research suggests that a better way to bring ICT to the pre-school environment is to broaden the definition to include a range of not just everyday electronic devices such as mobile phones and digital cameras, but smart toys, DVD players, toy mobiles and scanners. This could help to make it less 'alien' for practitioners and so boost their confidence."

However there are examples where practitioners are using ICT in new ways. Donnington St Matthew's Church of England Aided Primary school and Nursery Centre in Telford, Shropshire recently won the Naace quality 'kitemark' for its ICT work. There is a separate nursery facility on campus that caters for both family learning and pre-schoolers (3 and 4 year-olds), where staff encourage use of a range of digital tools and devices including an electronic microscope, and digital, still and video cameras as well as PCs. The nursery also uses interactive whiteboard technology and has broadband access to the internet.

For Head Teacher Glenn Calcutt, technology is a real help in enhancing and extending the nursery learning experience at the site. "The sooner children get exposed to ICT the better as it not only familiarises them with computers and other technologies, but also helps to spot a natural aptitude or interest in working with ICT. This goes beyond the basic benefit of familiarisation; we do want children from an early age to be comfortable with ICT, but we also want to integrate and embed technology into the educational experience."

Another nursery that seems to have avoided the 'PC in the corner' issue and integrated digital technology into the learning experience is St Saviour's Nursery and Infant School in Bath, a 60-place facility that offers a staff-led, child-initiated learning mixture.

Ed Harker, one of its nursery practitioners, says he finds ICT invaluable, primarily as a means to track and record the children's learning path: "We have found great success with using digital stills photography as a way to observe and record observations on children's progress in the form of individual digital learning diaries, which are all stored centrally on our main computer. Using this technology is a very efficient way for me, as the practitioner, to keep track of the child's progress as I can record what they're doing and keep engaged instead of breaking off to write paper notes. Also, the children love the immediacy of seeing themselves on the screen of the digital camera. It is much easier than describing it all in a report or transcribing their speech. We are now experimenting with MPEG4 files as a simple, portable solution as more information can be stored this way."

Broadening the definition of what ICT is and what it can do away from the stand-alone, albeit broadband-connected, PC seems to be a fruitful way forward, then. Certainly some of the work Harker is doing echoes the ideas of Penny Hay, an artist and educator now running the new Learning Centre in Bath who has extensively researched the topics of educational development and the use of ICT.

For her, "The best approach to children in the pre-school context using ICT has to be where it can act as documentation to make visible their progress. This is where the concept of the digital learning log could be very useful, with a concentration on mapping the child's learning journey. The more that the pedagogic and learning experience can be made visible and its impact made explicit, the better technology's benefit could be. We want computers to support children's curiosity, not compare their performance."

So research into ways to support child learning around many sorts of electronic deviceS seems to promise success. But have we answered our question? Does ICT in the pre-school context add value?

"There is unquestionably a place for ICT in the pre-school environment; a very minimal motivation is that the child benefits from being exposed to something that is also likely to be at home and will definitely be in later school and workplace settings. But what we seek to teach children can't be limited to mechanical expertise - how to use a mouse etc - but something much richer. This is a fruitful area for research and innovation to develop new technology teaching aids," says Plowman.

And in Harker's view, "Some children find computer games entrancing while others aren't that hooked. The point is flexibility - find what suits the individual child. ICT should be seen as just another tool in the pedagogical toolbox, surely and, in the same way that I couldn't manage without my pencils and clipboards these days, I don't want to give up my electronic devices."

For Dan Sutch, Learning Researcher at Futurelab, "We need to further develop devices that are appropriate to pre-school children: allowing them to access digital resources through movement, touch and speech; whilst walking outside or playing with friends. The resources we develop should prompt and provoke young children, let them gather and capture their experiences and stories, and enable them to share their experiences and understanding with adults and other children."

The answer to our question seems to be that pre-school ICT exposure can be beneficial, but that we need to be more creative in our use of it. Teaching staff can be helped by more support and encouragement to avoid the 'PC stuck in the corner' issue. Meanwhile, genuinely exciting research - like an innovative idea for a 'Magic Carpet' being developed at MIT where users launch and modify complex musical sounds and sequences as they wander about the carpet - suggests that we may have much more to teach ourselves and our children at this stage.

Further reading

The team at the University of Stirling have produced a number of interesting articles on this topic. See 'Children, play and computers in pre-school education' (British Journal of Educational Technology 36) and 'A benign addition' - research on ICT and pre-school children (the Journal of Computer-Assisted Learning No 19), both by Dr Lydia Plowman and Dr Christine Stephen. Also relevant is 'Already at a disadvantage? ICT in the home and children's preparation for primary school', published by the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta), Coventry.

The Futurelab Literature Review in Learning with Tangible Technologies (O'Malley and Danae 2004) gives a comprehensive overview of new and emerging haptic technologies, appropriate projects and literature that is relevant to pre-school/early years learning.

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