By Hanan Harrison

Participants of the Adelaide Digi Kids continued to be challenged on their digital journey when they attended Days 3 and 4 of their Hub workshops. Their first challenge was to develop and create a claymation. The focus was not only to develop skills for the production, but also to develop a philosophy of technology integration where participants would reflect critically on their own pedagogical practices, to develop a meaningful context for introducing claymation as an additional medium for story telling, which could be used to support various literacy outcomes including recount, narratives and procedural genres, as well as a tool for reinforcing other curriculum outcomes.

The second day was facilitated by Dr Sarah Prestridge, who introduced the group to blogs and podcasting.  The participants took on their new skills and developed interactive ways of utilising these on-line communication tools in an early childhood context, by producing their own podcasts and participating in a group blog about their ideas around technology integration.

Teacher reflections

Theo Purcha, a teacher member of the Digi Kids Adelaide Hub, reflected on his involvement with Digi Kids Hub so far, as follows.

At the beginning of the ‘Digi Kids’ course, my attitude to technology was very critical and to some degree negative. The reason for this was that I saw technology as competing with what I see as having the greatest impact in my classroom, namely brain-compatible teaching and learning. My impression of technology, as I saw it being used by others, was technology for the sake of technology, the curriculum driven by technology and students’ achievements measured mainly in terms of their competence, technology-wise. That impression has not changed, but what has changed is my attitude to and use of technology.

We have a school culture that encourages us to regularly use the computer room. In the past I would book my time in the computer room and at best only actually access it half of the time. When I was in the computer room what I taught was mainly computer skills or sometimes the students did some work in Kid Pix. I knew this was not effective use of our technology resources. So when I put up my hand to attend ‘Digi Kids’ it was more to pick up some skills that would help me to access the time I had in the computer room.  But this was to change through ‘Digi Kids’ and I am grateful it has.

For the first time I saw that technology does not need to drive the curriculum but that technology is there to support my teaching and the students’ learning. The notion of transition from 2D to 3D (teaching a key concept using traditional resources (3D) and integrating it with a computer software or technology (2D)) was a breath of fresh air.

Since then I have used technology to enhance and support teaching and learning right across the curriculum in a brain-compatible teaching and learning environment. In the computer room the emphasis is no longer on teaching technology skills but rather on supporting one of the curriculum areas through technology and learning the required skills as we need them. Students are more involved and motivated as we use a support base they are familiar with. During our weekly playtime students start to drift away from using games to using programs that enhance their skills and their learning in other curriculum areas. Exciting opportunities have developed like working together with our ‘buddy class’ , a four/five class, on claymation, developing an interactive blog site to engage parents with the learning of their children. or producing a power point presentation of our present SoSE unit with the class.

The challenge now is to try and initiate a dialogue about change from an ICT-driven curriculum to an ICT-supported curriculum.

If your school is interested in being part of the 2009 Digi Kids Hub (Technology Integration for Early Childhood), please register an expression of interest with Hanan Harrison.

Formal registrations will be advertised in Term 4 for Hubs starting in 2009.