Using stacking stories to investigate children’s virtual world play in a primary classroom.

As literacy researchers, we are interested in how children make meanings using digital technologies: how they use applications on digital devices such as laptops and iPads to create and access texts, as well as how they navigate and make sense of digital environments such as virtual worlds and video games. One of our methodological challenges involves finding ways to explore relationships between what children do on-screen and what they do off-screen. We are interested in how on- and off-line activities merge and mesh, and how what happens on-screen in a particular moment is shaped both by wider social, economic and cultural factors and by individual histories, experiences and feelings. The research methods often used can lead us to draw artificial boundaries between on- and off-screen