Early childhood educators are constantly giving feedback to children, co-educators, parents and management. With the high demands on our time and the need to document everything we do, educators often seek an appropriate way to provide feedback that is valuable, accurate, and is easy to do without requiring too much time or taking us away from our work with the children. Children's learning is often abstract and recording the process can be a challenge, especially when the process doesn't result in a final product or concrete piece of evidence to show for the child's new knowledge or skill. I believe that digital technology can provide educators with a suitable way of providing feedback and documenting the experiences and learning within an early childhood setting. Videoing a child's experience as they master a new task can be very rewarding not only for the child and educator but also as feedback for parents to show what their child has achieved at kindergarten.

Participatory research methods argue that young children should be enabled to contribute their perspectives on research seeking to understand their worldviews. Visual research methods, including the use of still and video cameras with young children have been viewed as particularly suited to this aim because cameras have been considered easy and fun to use for young children. However, how children learn to use cameras introduced into early childhood classrooms for research purposes is not well understood. In terms of visual research methodologies, this is a problem because participant use of cameras is associated with understanding the nature of visual data generated during the recording process itself. In this paper, we consider observational data of young children playing with video cameras introduced into their classrooms for research purposes. Drawing on the concepts of culturally mediated tool use and epistemic and ludic play, we theorise these observations to generate a new framework for understanding how children learn to use cameras through play-based activity. This framework suggests that research with children using still or video cameras may need to accommodate this learning within research designs and procedures in order to take full advantage of this medium. Pedagogical implications for using the framework to support young children's technological play are also considered.

Organisational narratives are foundational to inform the actions and directions of an organisation. Modern organisations often place great weight and invest significant time crafting their narratives that are communicated through mission statements, strategic plans, policies, directives and self-promotion. Sometimes these narratives align with the lived reality of the workers and those who deal with the organisation, but at other times there is a significant gap, or even chasm, between the portrayed ideal and the reality. This paper situates such narratives, and the lived experiences within critical organisational theory and a neoliberal framework. Utilising auto-ethnographic accounts of four academics within a higher education context, it highlights this gap and the need to voice concerns about this misalignment. The paper raises awareness of both organisations and workers to the importance of being true to narratives and ensuring they are an accurate representation of what happens. It offers ideas for resisting the disjunction between narrative and reality and a way of challenging neoliberalism within higher education.

Teacher performance assessments are positioned as a high stakes assessment that are aimed to ensure that preservice teachers are ready for professional practice in education contexts. The move to incorporate them in institutions has its origins in concerns that teacher education is a policy problem with varying standards of preparation across the sector. The article draws from research literature on the USA edTPA, which is used widely to benchmark graduate and undergraduate teaching capacity across the schooling and early childhood sectors, to consider how teacher performance assessments evoke a range of wicked problems for the early childhood sector in Australia. While they can be seen as a means for the teacher educator sector to regulate itself to ensure that "high quality" "profession ready" graduates are credentialed, there may be an attendant narrowing of pedagogy and emerging issues for a sector that is already undervalued, underfunded and fragmented. The authors highlight the importance for Australian preservice teachers to focus their efforts on pedagogical relations in early childhood education settings, gain proficiency in play-based learning, and participate in relationships that produce ongoing, socially and culturally contextualised assessments.

The guest blog introduces and explains the theory behind the Digital Play Framework (Bird & Edwards, 2014). By combining Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of tool mediation and Hutt’s (1966) ideas around epistemic and ludic play, the Digital Play Framework provides indicators that can be observed as children learn to use various technologies in early childhood settings. Within the blog, the observation handouts are introduced. The observation handouts take the Digital Play Framework and list the indicators children display as they are trying to learn how to use the various technologies. There are observation handouts for: all technologies, iPads, computers and cameras (still and video). Educators can use these to record when children meet each indicator as a way to assess the children’s technology skills and a way to plot the children’s technology device knowledge on the framework.

Self-talk has been recognised as an important tool used by children to regulate their thinking and behaviour. Existing studies typically characterise children's self-talk according to broad categories that do not allow for investigation of selfregulatory aspects of children's internalised self-talk. The findings reported in this paper are based on a pilot study aimed at eliciting information on self-talk that eight- to nine-year-olds employ in the context of their classroom tasks and at a stage when the children's self-talk is largely internalised. The findings offer useful insights into the types of self-regulatory self-talk employed by children in the classroom and suggest that these aspects should be considered in the characterisation and study of children's self-talk.

Digital technologies have become commonplace in nearly all areas of the modern life in Western society. Mobile phone users now have the ability to watch movies, surf the internet and perform all the functionalities of a computer on increasingly smaller devices. Children are capable of not only taking photos and movies, but they can successfully upload them to social media. They now have an online presence from a very early age, sometimes even before they are born. What does this mean for early childhood educational settings, where play is valued as the way children learn? Children are arriving at these services with a wide range of prior experiences including more technical knowledge than ever before, and sometimes, more than their educators.
The early childhood field began by debating the appropriateness of using technologies with young children, but current literature has moved on to now focus on exploring their engagement with technologies, and on the positive benefits of building children’s knowledge of technologies, prior to formal schooling. What is not clearly defined is how children engage with these devices when they are provided in play-based, learning settings. Educators often struggle to integrate these technologies into their play-based pedagogies, and to support children’s meaning making when their play involves these devices. While some targeted professional development for educators aims to build their knowledge around how to provide technologies for young children, these efforts have not been very effective when integrating them into play-based pedagogy. What is needed is greater understanding of how to provide technologies in meaningful ways, and how to implement child-focused pedagogies incorporating technologies that support children’s play and learning.
This thesis aims to explore the integration between children’s imaginative play with digital technologies, and the influences on educators’ provision of these devices in play-based settings. The research was conducted in two kindergarten settings, in suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. The children were aged four to six years and were attending kindergarten in the year prior to school entry. An ethnographic study was conducted over a 12-week period, with data being collected via video recordings, photographs, observations, conversations with children, interviews with educators and a researcher journal. The first contribution to knowledge that this thesis makes is the introduction of the Imaginative Affordance Framework, which combines Vygotsky’s (1966) concepts of mediation and imagination with Gibson’s (1979) concept of affordance. The framework was used to analyse the data collected and establish the findings related to the children’s imaginative play with digital technologies and to understand the educators’ provision of these devices.
The findings were presented and discussed as six paradoxes: working technologies versus non-working technologies; solitary individuals working with devices versus groups of children on devices; play-based, child centred programmes versus adult controlled programmes; nature discourse versus technologies as not natural; traditional kindergarten activities versus newer technological activities; and, children learning to navigate the rules pertaining to working technologies versus their desire to play according to their own volition. Based on the findings three recommendations were presented. These related to the children, the educators and the wider community and policy makers.
The second contribution to knowledge filled the gap in current understanding, established in the literature review, around how children engage with digital technologies in their imaginative play, influenced by what and how the devices are provided by their educators. The reasons behind the educators’ provision are discussed and their position as neoliberal subjects is recognised and explored. A diagram of provision is presented and suggestions for professional learning to address the intervention points within the diagram are made. The thesis concludes with recommendations of potential research that would further extend the knowledge base of this topic.