Browsing by Subject "TVT"
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(2014)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.
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(2015)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.
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(2016)The aim of this study is to investigate the reasons and restrictions behind teachers' use of ICT in their teaching, in a situation in which the school has a good number and variation of devices available. The main research question was: Why does or doesn't a teacher use the ICT devices in his/her teaching? For studying this further I used more specific questions that concerned 1) the amount and ways of using different equipment, 2) thoughts about the relevance of using the devices available and 3) the teachers' perceptions of their own competence regarding the same equipment. The study is a qualitative interview study. A semi-structured interview was used to collect the data from three primary school teachers. The teachers work in the same school where ICT devices are relatively well available. The research material was analyzed by the means of direction based content analysis. The teachers had many reasons for their use of ICT in teaching. The most common ones were the possibilities offered by the equipment, the different ways of learning, the importance of having ICT skills in today's society, the motivational reasons and the added practical value in everyday teaching. The main issue restricting their use was lack of time along with difficulties in prioritising, when the possibilities seem unlimited. Technical challenges were also a topic. Despite the challenges, the teachers were motivated to harness the potential of the devices to their legitimate purpose.
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(2019)Tiivistelmä - Referat - Abstract The purpose of this study is to examine the digitalization of finnish elementary school. The digitalization of elementary school is one of the main processes in finnish educational field. Digitalization is expected to renew obsolete pedagogical practices and teaching methods. Digitalization of education is seen as a way to achieve wanted know-how, but also it is ambition in itself. The material of this research consists such textual ensembles that has influence to organizing the finnish schooling. Material is comprised of finnish curriculum, and two reports that consider the development of the digitalization in finnish elementary school. The research analyse were made in discourse analytic framework, by analysing the texts seeking those discourses that were produced by speech, and also seeking those discourses that was able to see and witch were constructed by silences. The idea of discourse analyse is that spesific authoric speech is a use of poerty and way to build "truths". These truths are given to us, and usually accepted by us without granted. The digitalization of finnish elementary school is seen in this research as such given truth, that we accept and follow, despite the fact that there is several contradictory discourses linked to it. As a result of this study can be proposed that the digitalization of finnish elementary school is justified by arguing it as necessary citizen expertise that helps individual survive in the continuosly changing labour markets and society. This discourse consists the idea of lifelong learning. The digitalization of elementary school can be also seen as a discourse, where the main ambition is to maximize the governmentary finances and its growth, as a way to empower the competitiveness of the state. Third main discourse that were able to identify, is digitaliazations connection to neoliberalistic technology-economic orientation, that maintains the western economics, which ambition is to gain continuous growth of economics by production that is closely linked to ecological destruction and damage of environment of our planet.
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