ABSTRACT
Children in the 21st century are developing in a world of electronic media. These representational media present information to children in visual, verbal, and musical forms. These forms must be decoded for children to make sense of the stream of information being presented to them. This grammar of the information technologies, referred to as formal features, provides visual and auditory codes that can help children select, represent, and think about educational content. Sound effects and loud music, for example, can call attention to important contiguous information, thereby improving children's retention of that material. Actions in TV and computer programs can provide a visual way to think about content that children can then use to represent and remember that information, particularly when visual content is paired with language. Singing, by contrast, seems to foster superficial rote learning. Children who master these representational media will have access to, and control of, the information highway—the place where knowledge increasingly will be stored in the 21st century.
