scholarly journals Adopting Digital Technology in Teaching and Learning Environment in Early Childhood Education Classes in Nairobi County, Kenya

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Odundo Paul Amolloh ◽  
Ganira Khavugwi Lilian ◽  
Milimu Gladys Shaji

Dispositions towards use of digital technologies in modern early childhood settings have dramatically transformed aspects in education sector through development and integration of technology into education policy, curriculum and practice. Digital technology as a tool in instruction benefits learner’s fine motor skills, language and communication readiness, mathematical thinking as well as positive attitudes towards learning. Conversely inadequate educational and digital competence hampers teachers in Early Childhood Education (ECE) access to digital technology. This study assessed ways in which teachers in ECE in Kenya access digital technologies. It was designed as a two-phase exploratory mixed methods study. The design allowed collection of data from two groups of ECE educators: case study and survey teachers. Case-studies of two ECE centers (low and high technology) involving 11 ECE teachers were compared in order to examine similarities and differences in access to digital technologies. Similarly, teachers (n=508) in two education zones were surveyed and drawn in terms of similarities and differences in access to digital technologies. Findings indicated that ECE teachers in Kenya have limited access to digital technologies due to non-availability in ECE teaching and learning environments. To address this challenge, the study recommends Ministry of education to put emphasis on funding technology resources in early childhood settings. Furthermore, teachers in ECE should be exposed to a variety of developmentally appropriate digital technologies in order to effectively enhance teaching and learning.

Author(s):  
Maila D. H. Rahiem

AbstractDigital storytelling blends the ancient art of storytelling with a range of contemporary tools to weave stories together with the author's narrative voice, including digital images, graphics, music and sound. Digital storytelling, as both a teaching method and a learning resource, has been applied in many innovative ways at all levels of education. Digital storytelling supports student learning and allows teachers to adopt innovative and improved teaching methods. Storytelling is a proven and popular pedagogy, while digital storytelling is relatively recent and still seldom used in the setting of early childhood education. Using a case study of a storytelling–art–science club in Jakarta, Indonesia, the researcher explored how and why digital storytelling is used in early childhood education. This club is one of the few organizations that use digital storytelling for teaching and learning programs in early childhood. Data were collected qualitatively using in-depth interviews with four teachers, document analysis, and twice-observations of storytelling activities in each session with 35 and 37 children. The collected data were analyzed using analytical memoing methods. The results indicate that teachers in this club used digital storytelling for several important reasons. They claimed that simple digital technology made storytelling more entertaining, captivating, engaging, communicative and theatrical. This study suggests that the ability of teachers to use digital technology should be enhanced; schools' information and communication technology (ICT) devices should be equipped; some funding should also be allocated by the government to modernize school equipment; while the curriculum should be tailored to meet technological developments, and provide opportunities for children to learn how to make good use of technology.


Author(s):  
Ann-Christine Vallberg Roth

The article is based on a project intended to further develop understanding of similarities and differences in Nordic binding guidelines and non-binding guidance for content and quality in early childhood education. The study is of a descriptive and comparative nature and the process is based on a research tradition connected to curriculum studies. Both variation and standardisation emerge in the comparative analysis with regard to content construction. Quality is expressed and may be interpreted as operationalised as both structure and process. In relation to the study results, quality may be interpreted as primarily oriented towards institutions, activities and secondarily towards individuals. Quality is consistently related to learning (lifelong learning) and is more linear and oriented towards goal-rationality than non-linear.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Abril-López ◽  
Dolores López Carrillo ◽  
Pedro Miguel González-Moreno ◽  
Emilio José Delgado-Algarra

This article presents the research results in relation to an interdisciplinary teaching innovation project—Teaching and Learning of Social Sciences and Teaching and Learning of Natural Sciences—with Early Childhood Preservice Teachers (ECPT) at the University of Alcalá (Spain) in the pandemic context by COVID-19 during 2020–2021 (N = 55): 52 women (94.55%) and 3 men (5.45%) from 20 to 22 years of age. The main research problem is to know if the ECPT improves the learning to learn competence after a challenge-based learning (CBL) linked to virtual tour in a museum. The main objective was to improve the learning to learn competence, during a virtual tour at the Community of Madrid Regional Archaeological Museum (MAR) (Alcalá de Henares, Spain) for a reflective training of students to understand problems of the past and present and future global challenges, promote collaborative and multidisciplinary work, and defend ethics and leadership. In order to ascertain the level of acquisition of this competence in those teachers who were being trained, their self-perception—pretest–posttest—of the experience was assessed through a system of categories adapted from the European Commission. ECPT worked, in small groups and using e/m-learning tools, ten challenges and one storytelling cooperatively with university teachers to solve prehistoric questions related to current situations and problems. Subsequently, two Early Childhood Education teachers from a school in Alcalá de Henares reviewed the proposals and adapted them for application in the classroom of 5-year-old boys and girls. The results show an improvement in this competence in Early Childhood Preservice Teachers: total score pre-post comparison paired-samples Wilcoxon test result shows a statistically significant difference (p > 0.001); an evaluation rubric verified the results of self-perception. Second, we highlight the importance of carrying out virtual museum tours from a challenge-based learning for the development of big ideas, essential questions, challenges, and activities on socioeconomic, environmental, and emotional knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Third, this experience shows the insufficient educational adaptation of the virtual museum tour to the Early Childhood Education stage from a technological and didactic workshops point of view, but there is a diversity of paleontological and archaeological materials and a significant sociocritical discourse.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 311-322
Author(s):  
Rachel Langford ◽  
Brooke Richardson ◽  
Patrizia Albanese ◽  
Kate Bezanson ◽  
Susan Prentice ◽  
...  

Care and education have deep historical divisions in the Canadian policy landscape: care is traditionally situated as a private, gendered, and a welfare problem, whereas education is seen as a universal public good. Since the early 2000s, the entrenched divide between private care and public education has been challenged by academic, applied and political settings mainly through human capital investment arguments. This perspective allocates scarce public funds to early childhood education and care through a lens narrowly focused on child development outcomes. From the investment perspective, care remains a prerequisite to education rather than a public good in its own right. This chapter seeks to disrupt this neoliberal, human capital discourse that has justified and continues to position care as subordinate to education. Drawing upon the feminist ethics of care scholarship of philosopher Virginia Held, political scientist Joan Tronto, and sociologist Marian Barnes, this chapter reconceptualizes the care in early childhood education and care rooted through four key ideas: (1) Care is a universal and fundamental aspect of all human life. In early childhood settings, young children’s dependency on care is negatively regarded as a limitation, deficit and a burden. In contrast, in educational settings, older children’s growing abilities to engage in self-care and self-regulate is viewed positively. We challenge this dependence/independence dichotomy. (2) Care is more than basic custodial activities. The premise that care is focused on activities concerned with the child’s body and emotions, while education involves activities concerned with the mind, permeates early childhood education and care policy. Drawing on Held’s definition of care as value and practice, we discuss why this mind-body dualism is false. (3) Care in early childhood settings can be evaluated as promoting well-being or, in contradiction to the meaning of care, as delivering poor services that result in harm to young children. We will explore the relevancy of Barnes’s contention that parallel to theorizing about good care in social policy, “we need to be able to recognize care and its absence” through the cultivation of “ethics sensibilities and skills applied in different practices in different contexts.” (4) Care must be central to early childhood education and care policy deliberation. Using Tronto’s concept of a “caring democracy,” we discuss how such deliberation can promote care and the caring responsibilities of educators in early childhood settings, thereby redressing long standing gendered injustices. We argue that these four ideas can be framed in advocacy messages, in ways that bridge the silos of care and education as separate domains and which open up the vision of an integrated early childhood education and care system. A feminist ethics of care perspective offers new possibilities for practitioners, advocates, researchers, and decision-makers to reposition and reclaim care as integral to the politics and policies of early childhood education and care.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Yenina Akmal ◽  
Hikmah Hikmah ◽  
Ika Subekti ◽  
Ichtineza Halida Hardono

<p><em>Abstract</em><strong> - The presence of Early Childhood Education (ECE) tutor in Cibitung Tengah Village Tenjolaya District Bogor Regency is really needed for early childhood in order to become a guide in the ECE institutions. The problem occurred is that the average education level of ECE tutor is diverse, from Middle School, High School, Associate Degree, and Bachelor Degree. In this condition, we can say that those ECE tutors had not had the knowledge and insight about the ECE, namely the 2013 Curriculum, the ECE concept, and the learning devices. Training, along with the research about the role of those training itself, are need to be done in order to answer this question for increasing the knowledge and insight of ECE tutor using action research method. The results showed the enhancement of conducted training, including the enhancement of interest and motivation to develop their knowledge and insight about the ECE. Extended with the existence of WhatsApp group as a platform for communication between ECE tutors and UNJ researchers in the efforts to enhance the professionalism of ECE tutors, in the context of mentoring, ECE Tutors in the Cibitung Tengah, Tenjolaya Village were also involved in the learning devices production training in order to apply the religious moral concept to the ECE in the teaching and learning process at the UNJ and also to observe Ceria Daycare of the Department of ECE, Faculty of Education, UNJ.</strong></p><p><strong>Keyword - </strong>Early Childhood Education (ECE), 2013 Curriculum, Learning Devices</p>


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 175
Author(s):  
Soleha Soleha ◽  
Adian Husaini ◽  
Endin Mujahidin ◽  
Didin Saefuddin

<p>The existence of Early Childhood Education (PAUD) is immensely needed in the midst of our society. Still, there are many PAUD wich is not conduct yet their development process as required by mandate. Their existence are rarely concern and prioritize the quality of their institution, but quantity. Consequently, there are many PAUD which still have not conducted their learning process accordance with regulation, that is Permendiknas No. 58 year 2009 on standard of Early Childhood Education (PAUD). This research focused on the problem of implementation of early childhood religious character and its intelligence potentials, especially in PAUD Ceria dan Tamasha Valaq. Through its development the research tried to see the growth of religious and moral values, while the intelleigence was saw through physical, cognitive, language and socio-emotional potential.On the other side, the educational process was conducted using learn and play, exemplary, and internalization method apllied to the learners/kids. The research used a descriptive approach that tried to revealed phenomenon holistically and contextually by colleting data. The Early Childhood Education (PAUD) where this reasearh conducted is PAUD Ceria dan Tamasha Valaq in Pangkalpinang. Source of data is derived from Pangkal Pinang national department of education, Kindergarden Teacher Association (IGRA), Association of Indonesian Early Childhood Education (HIMPAUDI) Province Pangkalpinang, PAUD�s manager, teachers, representation of learners and their parents. Analyses method used by this research is qualitative method which used to find implementation of religious character intelligence potentials development in both of PAUD. The result showed that the process of learning conducted by both of PAUD already meet the standard of Early Childhood Education. Eventhough, each of PAUD have itself differencies. Implementation of religious character and intelligence potential development in their curriculum is adjusted with each institution due to absence of standard of curriculum. Learning plan areconsist of arranging annual activity plan, semester activity plan, weekly activity plan, and daily activity plan. According to the percentage of survey result, the impact of religious character development in both of PAUD is realy high. Significant average of every akhlak and its indicators is more than 50%. It proved that habituation and exemplary learning for early childhood are more effective.Result of intelligence potential development are vary due to the difference of aptitude and creativity of every child. From this research, researcher suggest the using of CTL (Contextual Teaching and Learning). It is suggested to make the teachers become more creative in developing the process of learning. As for developing intelligence potentials use the thematic development model systematically and holistically.</p><p>Keywords: Anak usia dini, karakter keagamaan, potensi kecerdasan</p>


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document