ABSTRACT
Stories about pets that died, lines of random letter strings, Wre-station Weldtrip photos, lopsided paintings of toothy orange jack-o’lanterns, drawings of green pea pods growing in a weedy spring garden, video clips of a class play, storybook scenes that come alive with animation and mood music, and e-mail messages for chicken-pox-afXicted classmates are but a partial list of the jumbled parade of images, sounds, and messages that I have seen
appear, disappear, and at times collide on the screen of a kindergarten classroom computer. After several years of observing classroom computer centers and the work children do there, I have come to appreciate the computer as a learning environment, a screenland (Labbo, 1996), that provides youngsters with unique opportunities to use multiple sign systems to make meaning in dynamic and social ways that are often as Xuid, transient, and natural as is their spoken language (Labbo, 1994; Labbo, Eakle, & Montero, 2002; Labbo & Kuhn, 2000).
