Is the notion of interactivity more efficient on children’s learning in traditional or digital illustration?

Since the creation of the Internet in the early 1980’s, this new media has considerably grown and changed our everyday lives and behaviours. In all domains and for every one, the power of New Technology influences us in our choices and decisions. This also includes children that are nowadays very used to manipulate computers at a very early age. This fact has changed the way that kids are brought up and the way they learn to grow up. Education now has to deal with the use of New Technology; the traditional books aren’t the only elements in children’s learning processes. The number of computers has increased in homes but also in schools. Moreover, it seems that teachers have to be nowadays real technicians and reorganize their teaching methods. Learning processes have certainly evolved a lot these last few years, and we can ask ourselves which educational techniques is best for our child? Should we continue to use traditional books and illustrations or should we make the most of what proposes the Internet? New technology in general offers a high level of interactivity and his known to make the user participate, but is this a valuable reason to forget the old traditional methods that have worked quite well before the invention of the World Wide Web? To be able to answer these questions, we will see in a first part the children’s business Industry and we will go through a large palette of websites for children that all have learning incomes. Then in a second part, we will be capable of establishing a comparison between educational methods through digital or traditional illustration. Finally, in the ultimate paragraph of this essay, the conclusion of this analysis will be completed with teacher’s thoughts on this subject.

Kids have become a big business – a multi-billion dollar big business. They are an extremely powerful target audience.