Browsing by Author "Thomssen Limonta, Tanja"

Digital competence and communication competence are basically a democracy issue. We live in a digital society, and therefore digital competence needs to be included as one of the many different things we work with in early childhood education, even for the very youngest. The goal of this research is to find out what digital learning can contain for children under 3 years of age to support language development. The research questions I ask are: How do educators use digital tools to support the child's early language development? What positive / negative effects arise from working with digital tools when it comes to children aged 0–3 years? I chose to do an interview study with a qualitative approach. I interviewed 5 teachers in early childhood education, and have deliberately chosen only teachers who told me that they work or have worked with digital tools in a 0–3 year group, because they probably have a lot of experience as a basis for their reflections. Before the interviews, I gave the teachers preliminary interview questions in order to be able to discuss the topic more comfortably and openly with them. The analysis was carried out as a thematic and inductive content analysis. The results show that digital tools are used to varying degrees according to the needs of the group of children and the knowledge of the staff. Photographs taken by the children themselves were considered to be the method that develops language the most because pictures created by the children themselves motivate the children to talk about them. It was felt that questions about screen time should be included in conversations about the child's plan so that the educators could determine how much digital tools the children can already use and what they need to practice.