Abstract:
The ability to be a social-being appears to be directly related to successful knowledge acquisition and success at school. In the Early Years of schooling social competence is an aspect of learning that can be either taught explicitly as a set of skills or acquired organically. The use of creative digital technologies in the Early Years has the potential to provide rich, hands-on learning opportunities which foster the development of social competence. This paper proposes a new framework for mapping collaborative development in the Early Years, the Social Processing Framework (SPF), for use with video recordings and classroom observations. The SPF has been designed as a new methodological tool that incorporates the development of social competence in Early Years' learners and uses creative digital technologies as a context to develop an engaging, collaborative learning environment. The framework can be used to better understand the development of social competence in the Early Years.