Browsing by Subject "ICT"

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.

Previous studies have confirmed that educational practices have not changed with the digitalization of society. The use of ICT in teaching is mainly low and there is an ongoing public debate regarding the Finnish students well-being. This study tried to find out is there a hypothesized gap between the technology-mediated practices of adolescents and school. The aim of this study was to investigate how and how much ICT is used for learning and what kind of technological attitudes and school well-being experiences students have. It was also examined how the use of technology, attitudes and well-being are interrelated and which factors of these phenomena can explain academic achievement, schoolwork engagement, school value, happiness and school burnout. Finally it was investigated what kind of profiles of ICT use and attitudes could be found among the participants. The study was part of the Mind the Gap -project. The data was collected by questionnaire in the 2013. The participants (n = 735) were sixth graders from Helsinki. The use of digital technology, technology attitudes and school well-being were examined by mean values and gender differences by t-test. Correlational analysis and stepwise regression analysis were carried out to find out the factors that were related to academic achievement, schoolwork engagement, school value, happiness and school burnout. Students were grouped into profiles that represented their technological attitudes and use of ICT using SPSS two-step cluster analysis. One-way ANOVA and cross-tabulations were used to examine group and gender differences. The results indicated that the technology is not used on a regular basis to support learning, even though the students felt quite high ICT enthusiasm (the use of technology was seen as a positive contribution to the schoolwork engagement). Information-orientated use was reported most common. Mechanical technology use (eg. writing) was the next most common, producing technology use (eg. projects, multimedia) came in the third. Communicative technology use (online discussion about schoolwork) was the least common. The majority of the sixth graders felt relatively high schoolwork engagement, happiness and school value. Further, students reacted positively towards the teacher's activity and the conditions of the school. ICT enthusiasm was associated with lower experience of school value, schoolwork engagement as well as negative experiences of teacher's activities. Technology-related problem-solving predicted schoolwork engagement positively. Information-orientated use, and fear of failure using technology were repeatedly negative predictors for school well-being and positive predictors for school burnout. Four different groups (actives, slackers, passives, enthusiastics) showed clear differences in the use of technology, attitudes, school well-being and the associations between these phenomena. To conclude, teacher's role and how the technology is used in schools appears essential. It's important to understand students' predispositions towards using digital technologies and support adolescents' natural ways of utilizing ICT. Students need guidance to understand the possibilities of digital technologies as collaborative and creative learning tools. This, however, does not happen by chance. Therefore, I argue, that there is a need in basic education to build new support systems for national, municipal, school and grade levels to minimize the gap between the technology-mediated practices of adolescents and school.

The purpose of this master’s thesis is to investigate the experiences and views of growth companies about employer brand. The selected companies operate in the ICT industry. The research examines the significance of employer brand to growth companies and the ways companies seek to influence their employer brand. As a third matter, the research investigates what kind of development stages of employer brands can be recognized among the interviewed companies. This method used in the study is qualitative and the material has been collected by interviewing seven employees working in different growth companies. The interviewees are all to some extent responsible for their company's employer branding and the management of it. The analysis was made as a content analysis and the approach to the analysis was theory-driven. Employer branding was perceived as an important topic in general, but actions regarding it varied. In companies, employer branding was particularly affected by challenges in general awareness of the company. The importance of the employer brand for companies varied, especially depending on to what extent the company strives to grow in the future. The ways of influencing the employer brand did also vary, with an emphasis on general communication and marketing, recruitment communication and the development of the internal employee experience. Five different development stages of the employer brand were found among the companies, starting from the employer brand's insignificance up to the development stage of strengthening the employer brand.