Creativity and Digital Technologies in Education: Evolving Tools, Contexts, and Creative Practices

Creativity and technology have each become central to contemporary education, yet scholarship examining their intersection has developed across diverse disciplines, cre-ating a need for integrative perspectives. This review examines how digital technologies mediate creative possibility and practice in educational contexts, tracing the evolution from physical and analog tools through networked systems to contemporary generative technologies. Drawing on sociocultural theories of creativity and affordance theory, the review explores how each technological era has reshaped both creative practice and participation structures. The contemporary landscape encompasses networked platforms enabling participatory creativity, physical-digital tools supporting embodied making, and generative AI systems challenging traditional notions of creative authorship. Critical tensions emerge around defining and assessing creativity in digital contexts, addressing equity and access barriers, and navigating institutional pressures that simultaneously demand innovation and standardization. Implications point toward pedagogical ap-proaches emphasizing distributed creativity, teacher education grounded in crea-tive-technological experience, policy frameworks providing coherent guidance beyond rhetoric, and research attending to equity and practice-based knowledge. The co-evolution of creativity and technology continues, with education's challenge being to participate purposefully in shaping technologies and practices toward equitable and humanizing ends.