Young children’s access to internet-enabled touchscreen technologies is rising around the world. Touchscreen interface technologies such as iPads are easily used by young children and have been associated with rapid uptake of technologies and increased consumption of digital media and popular-culture by young children (Flewitt, Messer & Kucirkov, 2014). This increased uptake by children 0-5 years has been particularly noticeable in countries such as South Korea, Britain, Australia, Sweden and  the Netherlands (Holloway,  et al., 2013). Children aged 0-5 typically use technologies for at least one to two hours per day (Children’s Commissioner, 2017)

The influence of digital media, technologies and popular-culture on young children’s play is now persuasive. A challenge for early childhood educators is how best to capture and build on these interests in the early childhood classroom as the basis for building young children’s participation in learning. Primary and secondary teachers are able to access pedagogical concepts such as multi-literacies or ‘New Learning’ to support them in building students’ digital literacy and multimodality capacities (Kalanztis & Cope, 2012; New London Group, 1996). So far in early childhood education there is no pedagogical equivalent to multi-literacies and new literacies.

Early childhood education is yet to develop a comprehensive framework for attending to young children’s play with technologies, digital media and popular-culture – or what we call ‘New Play’. The field needs a new pedagogical knowledge base to help teachers integrate digital technologies, media and popular-culture into the curriculum (Marsh, 2010). Better understandings of technological play are needed (Yelland, 2011) and professional learning about integrating technologies with play is a critical issue facing early childhood teachers (Barron, et al., 2011), as is the need to understand how teachers can integrate play-based learning with technologies (NAEYC Position Statement, 2012).

In this paper, we report the early findings from a research project investigating the range of New Play pedagogies developed and implemented by early childhood educators based on the concept of web-mapping. Web-mapping is a pedagogical observation and planning innovation that integrates traditional play, such as construction and/or role play with young children’s engagements in digital and popular-culture based activities. Using Vygotsky’s (1987) concept of tool mediation, we examine the use of web-mapping as a new conceptual tool for fostering children’s New Play that allows educators to realise new pedagogical activities that integrate traditional and digital activities as the object of their activity. The research questions are:

• What teaching practices are generated by teacher use of the web-mapping tool?
• What learning outcomes for children correspond with teaching practices derived from the use of the web-mapping tool? 

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