ISSN: 2222-6990
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Schools increasingly face a dual mandate: to support students’ socio-emotional well-being under high-stakes academic pressure while also developing creative competencies that matter for learning, identity and future work. Educational technology research, however, often evaluates artmaking tools in isolation (e.g., VR painting, tablets, paper drawing, or generative-AI co-creation), leaving educators with limited guidance on how combinations of modalities can be sequenced and orchestrated within real-world classrooms—especially in exam-oriented school systems. This theoretical article addresses that gap by proposing a multi-modal ecology framework for artmaking technologies in schools. The framework treats each modality as an interacting node and specifies six cross-cutting mechanism dimensions that shape both well-being and digital creativity: immersion/presence, agency/authorship, emotional expressiveness, cognitive load/entry barriers, social visibility/evaluation dynamics, and practical scalability/equity. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature in learning sciences, digital well-being, arts-based approaches and XR/AI research, the article advances theory-driven propositions about how different modality configurations may enable short-term stress relief and longer-term creative development. It concludes with implications for ecological instructional design and a research agenda for comparative, longitudinal and design-based studies in exam-oriented schools.
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