Browsing by Subject "2000-luvun taidot"

In the past few decades, Western countries have evolved from industrial societies to information societies. Skills that are useful in life and work are not the same as before. Schools as an institution have been criticized for lagging behind in change. For this reason,21st Century Skills have been developed to work as a model of skills useful in the future. The aim of this study is to observe the ICT projects of some first-graders in one school through the lens of 21st Century Skills. My goal is to study which 21st Century Skills were learned in the projects and how. iPads were used in the projects; two classes made multimedia books of themselves and one made video interviews about different professions. The pupils also used Edmodo, which is a social media and learning environment aimed at schools. Their activity in Edmodo is also studied from the viewpoint of 21st Century Skills. Social media has changed the way people live and work in a global level, but it has not been used or studied much in elementary schools. My study is a case study whose subjects were pupils from three 1st grade classes (age ~7) in an elementary school in Helsinki metropolitan area. The school has a pedagogical ICT support person who planned and carried out the projects together with the class teachers. The projects took place in April-May 2013 and I was present at the school to observe the lessons. The data of my study comprises of my own observation notes, the video material I filmed and the content the pupils produced in Edmodo. The data is analyzed with theorybased themes as per a model of 21st Century Skills. All three classes were analyzed together. The data reflects the future challenges of teaching. Many contents of 21st Century Skills were learned in the projects. Especially, skills related to social interaction, technology, creativity and problem solving were learned. The pupils shared ideas and solved problems together. Their actions were creative and target-oriented. By using iPads the pupils worked on their ICT skills and learned to use new apps and services quickly. Edmodo supported social and technological learning goals. Some pupils uploaded a lot of content to Edmodo, some only a little. Although social media was used only briefly by the students, they learned vital skills for upcoming years in school.

The study analyzed the actors, contexts and technology used in the Innokas Network, which focuses on school development at the grassroots level, in the light of the blog posts pro-duced by the network in 2011–2019. Teachers and their expertise play an important role in the transformation of education, and networked development communities provide an oppor-tunity for the co-development of innovations and their widespread dissemination. The Innokas Network is such a school development network whose members are school, private and third sector actors as well as researchers. The Innokas Network maintains a thematic community blog where members of the network write about the network's activities. More information is needed on networked development activities, as research has found it to be an effective way to increase people’s knowledge and skills. The research questions were: 1) which technologies do the authors of the Innokas Network blog refer to in the blog posts written in 2011–2019, 2) what kind of social and pedagogical frameworks and actors are described in the blog posts and 3) how are the different actors, pedagogical frameworks and technologies present in different social frameworks? The research data consisted of a total of 401 blog posts from 2011–2019 on the Innokas network's public blog. Blog posts were analyzed using qualitative content analysis as well as cross-tabulation. The blog post mentioned a total of 275 different technologies. The technologies most featured in blog posts were programmable robotics, programmable microcontrollers, and programming platforms. Activities were described in five different social frameworks: micro-community, school community, local community, national level and international level. The most typical pedagogical frameworks were a lesson, training, and club activities. The most typical actors were the student, the teacher and the tutor. For each social frameworks, the typical pedagogical frameworks and actors involved in the activity were outlined. Networked development activities reaches a large number of different actors and networking activities take place on several different levels and in a wide variety of frameworks. A broad range of technologies are involved in the network's activities, but there is a clear emphasis on innovative technologies such as robotics and other technologies that require programming.